According to Kant, nature is entirely in the human spirit; according to Goethe, the human spirit is entirely in nature because nature itself is spirit. It is, therefore, easily understandable when Goethe tells us in his essay, Influence of
Modern Philosophy: Kant"s Critique of Pure Reason was completely outside my world. I attended many conversations concerning this book, and with some attention I could observe that the old main question of how much our own self contributed to our spiritual existence, and how much the outside world did, was renewed. I never separated them, and when I philosophized in my own way about objects, I did so with an unconscious naivete, really believing that I saw my opinion before my very eyes.
We need not waver in this estimate of Goethe"s att.i.tude toward Kant, in spite of the fact that Goethe uttered many a favorable judgment about the philosopher of Koenigsberg.
This opposition between Kant and himself would only then have become quite clear to him if he had engaged himself in a thorough study of Kant, but this he did not do. In the above- mentioned essay he says, "It was the introductory pa.s.sages that I liked; into the labyrinth itself, however, I could not venture to go; I was kept from it now by my poetic imagination, now by my common sense, and nowhere did I feel myself furthered."
Goethe has, nevertheless, expressed his opposition distinctly on one occasion in a pa.s.sage that has been published only from the papers of the residuary estate in the Weimar Goethe Edition (Weimarische Ausgabe, 2; Abteilung, Band XI, page 377). The fundamental error of Kant was, as here expressed by Goethe, that he "considers the subjective faculty of knowledge as an object and discriminates the point where the subjective and the objective meet with great penetration but not quite correctly." Goethe just happens to be convinced that it is not only the spirit as such that speaks in the subjective human faculty of cognition, but that it is the spirit of nature that has created for itself an organ in man through which it reveals its
secrets. It is not man at all who speaks about nature, but it is nature who speaks in man about itself. This is Goethe"s conviction. Thus, he could say that whenever the controversy concerning Kant"s world view "was brought up, I liked to take the side that gave most honor to man, and I completely agreed with all those friends who maintained with Kant that, although all our knowledge begins with experience, it nevertheless does not originate from experience." For Goethe believed that the eternal laws according to which nature proceeds are revealed in the human spirit, but for this reason, they were not merely the subjective laws of the spirit for him, but the objective laws of the order of nature itself.
It is for this reason also that Goethe could not agree when Schiller, under the influence of Kant, erected a forbidding wall of separation between the realms of natural necessity and of freedom. Goethe expressed himself on this point in his essay, First Acquaintance with Schiller: Schiller and some friends had absorbed the Kantian philosophy, which elevates the subject to such height while apparently narrowing it. It developed the extraordinary traits that nature had laid into his character and he, in his highest feeling of freedom and self determination, tended to be ungrateful to the great mother who had certainly not treated him stingily. Instead of considering nature as self-supporting, alive and productively spreading order and law from the lowest to the highest point, Schiller took notice of it only in the shape of a few empirical human natural inclinations.
In his essay, Influence of Modern Philosophy, Goethe points to his difference with Schiller in these words. "He preached the gospel of freedom; I was unwilling to see the rights of nature infringed upon." There was, indeed, an element of Kant"s mode of conception in Schiller, but so far as Goethe is concerned, we are right in accepting what he himself said with
regard to some conversations he had with the followers of Kant. "They heard what I had to say but they could not answer me or further me in any way. More than once it happened that one or the other of them admitted to me with a surprised smile that my conception was, to be sure, a.n.a.logous to that of Kant, but in a curious fashion indeed."
Goethe did not consider art and beauty as a realm that was torn out of the interconnection of reality, but as a higher stage of nature"s order. At the sight of artistic creations that especially interested him during his Italian journey he wrote, "Like the highest works of nature, the lofty works of art have been produced by men according to true and natural laws.
Everything that is arbitrary and merely imagined fades away before them. Here is necessity; here is G.o.d." When the artist proceeds as the Greeks did, namely, "according to the laws that Nature herself follows," then his works contain the same G.o.dly element that is to be found in nature itself. For Goethe, art is "a manifestation of secret natural laws." What the artist creates are works of nature on a higher level of perfection. Art is the continuation and human completion of nature, for "as man finds himself placed at the highest point of nature, he again considers himself a whole nature and as such has again to produce a peak in himself. For this purpose he raises his own existence by penetrating himself with all perfections and virtues, produces choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally lifts himself as far as to the production of the work of art." Everything is nature, from the inorganic stone to the highest of man"s works of art, and everything in this nature is ruled by the same "eternal, necessary and thereby divine laws," such that "the G.o.dhead itself could not change anything about it" (Poetry and Truth, Book XVI).
When, in 1811, Goethe read Jacobi"s book, On Things Divine, it made him "uneasy."
How could the book of a so warmly beloved friend, in which I was to see the thesis developed that nature conceals G.o.d, be welcome to me! My mode of world conception - purely felt, deeply-seated, inborn and practised daily as it was - had taught me inviolably to see G.o.d in Nature, Nature in G.o.d, and this to such an extent that this world view formed the basis of my entire existence. Under these circ.u.mstances, was not such a strange, one-sided and narrow-minded thesis to estrange me in spirit from this most n.o.ble man for whose heart I felt love and veneration? I did not, however, allow my painful vexation to linger with me but took refuge in my old asylum, finding my daily entertainment for several weeks in Spinoza"s Ethics, and as my inner education had progressed in the meantime, to my astonishment I became aware of many things that revealed themselves to me in a new and different light and affected me with a peculiar freshness.
The realm of necessity in Spinoza"s sense is a realm of inner necessity for Kant. For Goethe, it is the universe itself, and man with all his thinking, feeling, willing and actions is a link in this chain of necessities. In this realm there is only one order of law, of which the natural and the moral represent only the two sides of its essence. "The sun sheds its light over those good and evil, and to the guilty as to the best, the moon and the stars shine brightly." Out of one root, out of the eternal springs of nature, Goethe has everything pour forth: The inorganic and the organic beings, and man with all the fruits of his spirit, his knowledge, his moral order and his art.
What G.o.d would just push the world from without, And let it run in circles on his finger?
Him it behooves to move it in its core, Be close to nature, hug her to her breast So that what lives and weaves in him and is, Will never lack his power and his spirit.
In these words Goethe summed up his credo. Against Hailer, who had written the lines, "Into nature"s sacred center, no created spirits enter," Goethe turns with his sharpest words: "Into nature"s sacred center,"
O, Philistine past compare "No created spirits enter"
Wished you never would remind Me and all those of my kind Of this shallow verbal banter.
We think we are everywhere With every step in Nature"s care.
"Happy he to whom she just Shows her dry external crust."
I hear that repeated these sixty years Curse under my breath so no one hears, And to myself I a thousand times tell: Nature has neither core nor sh.e.l.l, Everything yields she gladly and well.
Nature is at our beck and call Nature herself is one and all.
Better search yourself once more Whether you be crust or core.
In following this world conception Goethe could also not recognize the difference between inorganic and organic nature, which Kant had ascertained in his Critique of Judgment. Goethe tended to explain living organisms according to the laws by which lifeless nature is explained.
Concerning the various species in the plant world, the leading botanist of that time, Linne, states that there were as many species as there "have been created fundamentally different forms." A botanist who holds such an opinion can only attempt to study the quality of the individual forms and to differentiate them carefully from one another. Goethe could not consent to such a view of nature. "What Linnaeus wanted
with might and main to separate, I felt in the very roots of my being as striving into union." Goethe searched for an ent.i.ty that was common to all species of plants. On his Italian journey this general archetype in all plant forms becomes clearer to him step by step.
The many plants I have heretofore been used to see only in buckets and pots, here grow merrily and vigorously under the open sky, and while they thus fulfill their destination, they become clearer to us. At the sight of such a variety of new and renewed forms, my curious and favorite idea again occurred to me. Could I not discover in this crowd the archetypal plant (Urpflanze)? There really must be such a thing. How should I otherwise know that this or that given form is a plant if they had not all been designed after one model?
On another occasion Goethe expresses himself concerning this archetypal plant by saying, "It is going to become the strangest creature of the world for which nature herself shall envy me.
With this model and the corresponding key, one is then capable of inventing plants to infinity, but they must be consistent in themselves, that is to say, plants that, even if they do not exist, at least could exist, and that are not merely shadows and schemes of a picturesque or poetic imagination, but have an inner truth and necessity." As Kant, in his Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, exclaims, "Give me matter and I will build you a world out of it," because he has gained insight into the law-determined interconnection of this world, so Goethe p.r.o.nounces here that with the aid of the archetypal plant one could invent plants indefinitely that would be capable of existence because one would be in possession of the law of their origin and their development.
What Kant was ready to acknowledge only for inorganic nature, that is, that its phenomena can be understood according to necessary laws, Goethe extends also to the world of organisms. In the letter in which he tells Herder about his
discovery of the archetypal plant, he adds, "The same law will be applicable to all other living beings," and Goethe applies it, indeed. In 1795, his persevering studies of the animal world led him to "feel free to maintain boldly that all perfect organic beings, among which we see fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and at the top of the ladder, man, were formed after one model, which in its constant parts only varies in one or another direction and still develops and transforms daily through propagation."
In his conception of nature as well, therefore, Goethe stands in full opposition to Kant. Kant had called it a risky "adventure of reason," should reason attempt to explain the living with regard to its origin. He considered the human faculty of cognition as unfit for such an explanation.
It is of infinite importance for reason not to eliminate the mechanism of nature in its productions, and not to pa.s.s by this idea in their explanation because without it no insight into the nature of things can be obtained. Even if it is admitted to us that the highest architect has created the forms of nature as they have been forever, or predetermined those that form according to the same model in the course of their development, our knowledge of nature would thereby nevertheless not be furthered in the slightest degree because we do not know at all the mode of action and the ideas of this being that are to contain the principles of the possibility of the natural beings and therefore cannot explain nature by means of them from above.
Against Kantian arguments of this kind, Goethe answers: If, in the moral realm through faith in G.o.d, virtue and immortality, we are to lift ourselves into the higher region and to approach the first Being, we should be in the same situation in the intellectual field, so that we, through the contemplation
of an ever creative nature, should make ourselves worthy of a spiritual partic.i.p.ation in its productions. As I had at first unconsciously and, following an inner instinct, insisted upon and relentlessly striven toward the archetypal, the typical, as I had even succeeded in constructing an appropriate picture, there was now nothing to keep me from courageously risking the adventure of reason, as the old man from Koenigsberg himself calls it.
In his archetypal plant, Goethe had seized upon an idea "with which one can . . . invent plants to infinity, but they must be consistent, that is to say, even if they do not exist, nevertheless they could exist and are not merely shadows and schemes of a picturesque or poetic imagination but have an inner truth and necessity." Thus, Goethe shows that he is about to find not merely the perceptible idea, the idea that is thought, in the self-conscious ego, but the living idea. The self-conscious ego experiences a realm in itself that manifests itself as both self- contained and at the same time appertaining to the external world, because the forms of the latter prove to be moulded after the models of the creative powers. With this step the self- conscious ego can appear as a real being. Goethe has developed a conception through which the self-conscious ego can feel itself enlivened because it feels itself in union with the creative ent.i.ties of nature. The world conception of modern times attempted to master the riddle of the self-conscious ego; Goethe plants the living idea into this ego, and with this force of life pulsating in it, it proves to be a life-saturated reality.
The Greek idea is akin to the picture; it is contemplated like a picture. The idea of modern times must be akin to life, to the living being; it is inwardly experienced. Goethe was aware of the fact that there is such an inward experience of the idea. In the self-conscious ego he perceived the breath of the living idea.
Goethe says of Kant"s Critique of Judgment that he "owed a most happy period of his life to this book." "The great leading thoughts of this work were quite a.n.a.logous to my previous creations, actions and thinking. The inner life of art and nature, the unfolding of the activity in both cases from within, was distinctly expressed in this book." Yet, this statement of Goethe must not deceive us concerning his opposition to Kant, for in the essay in which it occurs, we also read, "Pa.s.sionately stimulated, I proceeded on my own paths so much the quicker because I, myself, did not know where they led, and because I found little resonance with the Kantians for what I had conquered for myself and for the methods in which I had arrived at my results. For I expressed what had been stirred up in me and not what I had read."
A strictly unitary (monastic) world conception is peculiar to Goethe. He sets out to gain one viewpoint from which the whole universe reveals its law structure - "from the brick that falls from the roof to the brilliant flash of inspiration that dawns on you and that you convey." For "all effects of whatever kind they may be that we observe in experience are interconnected in the most continuous fashion and flow into one another."
A brick is loosened from a roof. We ordinarily call this accidental. It hits the shoulder of a pa.s.serby, one would say mechanically, but not completely mechanically; it follows the laws of gravity and so its effect is physical. The torn vessels of living tissue immediately cease to function; at the same moment, the fluids act chemically, their elementary qualities emerge. But the disturbed organic life resists just as quickly and tries to restore itself. In the meantime, the whole human being is more or less unconscious and psychically shattered.
Upon regaining consciousness the person feels ethically deeply hurt, deploring the interrupted activity of whatever kind it might have been, for man will only reluctantly yield to
patience. Religiously, however, it will be easy for him to ascribe this incident to Providence, to consider it a prevention against a greater evil, as a preparation for a good of a higher order. This may be sufficient for the patient, but the recovered man arises genially, trusts in G.o.d and in himself and feels himself saved. He may well seize upon the accidental and turn it to his own advantage, thus beginning a new and eternally fresh cycle of life.
Thus, with the example of a fallen brick Goethe ill.u.s.trates the interconnection of all kinds of natural effects. It would be an explanation in Goethe"s sense if one could also derive their strictly law-determined interconnection out of one root.
Kant and Goethe appear as two spiritual antipodes at the most significant moment in the history of modern world conception, and the att.i.tude of those who were interested in the highest questions was fundamentally different toward them. Kant constructed his world conception with all the technical means of a strict school philosophy; Goethe philosophized naively, depending trustfully on his healthy nature. For this reason, Fichte, as mentioned above, believed that in Goethe he could only turn "to the representative of the purest spirituality of Feeling as it appears on the stage of humanity that has been reached at the present time." But he had the opinion of Kant "that no human mind can advance further than to the limit at which Kant had stood, especially in his Critique of Judgment." Whoever penetrates into the world conception of Goethe, however, which is presented in the cloak of naivete, will, nevertheless, find a firm foundation that can be expressed in the form of clear ideas. Goethe himself did not raise this foundation into the full light of consciousness.
For this reason, his mode of conception finds entrance only slowly into the evolution of philosophy, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century it is Kant"s position with which the spirits first attempt to come to clarity and with whom they
begin to settle their account.
No matter how great Kant"s influence was, his contemporaries could not help feeling that their deeper need for knowledge could not become satisfied by him. Such a demand for enlightenment urgently seeks after a unitary world conception as it is given in Goethe"s case. With Kant, the individual realms of existence are standing side by side without transition. For this reason, Fichte, in spite of his unconditional veneration for Kant, could not conceal from himself the fact "that Kant had only hinted at the truth, but had neither presented nor proved it." And further: This wonderful, unique man had either a divination for the truth without being aware of the reasons for it, or he estimated his contemporaries as insufficient to have these reasons conveyed to them, or, again, he was reluctant during his lifetime to attract the superhuman veneration that sooner or later would have been bestowed upon him. No one has understood him as yet, and n.o.body will succeed in doing so who does not arrive at Kant"s results in following his own ways; when it does happen, the world really will be astonished.
But I know just as certainly that Kant had such a system in mind, that all statements that he actually did express are fragments and results of this system, and have meaning and consistence only under this presupposition.
For, if this were not the case, Fichte would "be more inclined to consider the Critique of Pure Reason the product of the strangest accident than as the work of a mind."
Other contemporaries also judged Kant"s world of ideas to be insufficient. Lichtenberg, one of the most brilliant and at the same time most independent minds of the second half of the
eighteenth century, who appreciated Kant, nevertheless could not suppress significant objections to his philosophy. On the one hand he says, "What does it mean to think in Kant"s spirit? I believe it means to find the relation of our being, whatever that may be, toward the things we call external, that is to say, to define the relation of the subjective to the objective. This, to be sure, has always been the aim of all thorough natural scientists, but it is questionable if they ever proceeded so truly philosophically as did Herr Kant. What is and must be subjective was taken as objective."
On the other hand, however, Lichtenberg observes, "Should it really be an established fact that our reason cannot know anything about the supersensible? Should it not be possible for us to weave our ideas of G.o.d and immortality to as much purpose as the spider weaves his net to catch flies? In other words, should there not be beings who admire us because of our ideas of G.o.d and immortality just as we admire the spider and silkworm?"
One could, however, raise a much more significant objection.
If it is correct that the law of human reason refers only to the inner worlds of the mind, how do we then manage even to speak of things outside ourselves at all? In that case, we should have to be completely caught in the cobweb of our inner world. An objection of this kind is raised by G. E.
Schulze (1761 1833) in his book, Aenesidemus, which appeared anonymously in 1792. In it he maintains that all our knowledge is nothing but mere conceptions and we could in no way go beyond the world of our inner thought pictures.
Kant"s moral truths are also finally refuted with this step, for if not even the possibility to go beyond the inner world is thinkable, then it is also impossible that a moral voice could lead us into such a world that is impossible to think. In this way, a new doubt with regard to all truths develops out of Kant"s view, and the philosophy of criticism is turned into
scepticism.
One of the most consistent followers of scepticism is S.
Maimon (1753 1800), who, from 1790 on, wrote several books that were under the influence of Kant and Schulze. In them he defended with complete determination the view that, because of the very nature of our cognitive faculty, we are not permitted to speak of the existence of external objects.
Another disciple of Kant, Jacob Sigismund Beck, went even so far as to maintain that Kant himself had really not a.s.sumed things outside ourselves and that it was nothing but a misunderstanding if such a conception was ascribed to him.
One thing is certain; Kant offered his contemporaries innumerable points for attack and interpretations. Precisely through his unclarities and contradictions, he became the father of the cla.s.sical German world conceptions of Fichte, Sch.e.l.ling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher.
His unclarities became new questions for them. No matter how he endeavored to limit knowledge in order to make place for belief, the human spirit can confess to be satisfied in the true sense of the word only through knowledge, through cognition. So it came to pa.s.s that Kant"s successors strove to restore knowledge to its full rights again, that they attempted to settle through knowledge the highest needs of man.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 1814) seemed to be chosen by nature to continue Kant"s work in this direction. Fichte confessed, "The love of knowledge and especially speculative knowledge, when it has laid hold on man, occupies him to such an extent that no other wish is left in him but that to pursue it with complete calm and concentration." Fichte can be called an enthusiast of world conception. Through this enthusiasm he must have laid a charm on his contemporaries and especially on his students. Forberg, who was one of his disciples, tells us:
In his public addresses his speech rushes powerfully on like a thunderstorm that unloads its fire in individual strokes of lightning; he lifts the soul up; he means to produce not only good men but great men; his eye is stern; his step bold; through his philosophy he intends to lead the spirit of the age; his imagination is not flowery, but strong and powerful; his pictures are not graceful but bold and great. He penetrates into the innermost depths of his object and he moves in the realm of concepts with an ease that betrays that he not only lives in this invisible land, but rules there.
The most outstanding trait in Fichte"s personality is the grand, serious style of his life conception. He measures everything by the highest standards. In describing the calling of the writer, for instance, he says: The idea itself must speak, not the writer. All his arbitrary traits, his whole individuality, all the manner and art peculiar to himself must have died in his utterances so that the manner and art of his idea alone may live, the highest life it can obtain in this language and this age. Since he is free from the obligations of the oral teacher, he is also free to conform to the-receptivity of others without their excuses. He has not a given reader in mind but postulates the one who reads him, laying down the law as to how he must do so.
But the work of the writer is a work for eternity. Let future ages swing up to a higher level in the science he has deposited in his work. What he has laid down in his book is not only the science, but the definite and perfect character of an age in regard to this science, and this will retain its interest as long as there are human beings in this world. Independent of all vicissitude, his writing speaks in all ages to all men who are capable of bringing his letters to life and who are stirred by his message, elevated and enn.o.bled until the end of the world.
A man speaks in these words who is aware of his call as a spiritual leader of his age, and who seriously means what he says in the preface to his Doctrine of Science: "My person is of no importance at all, but Truth is of all importance for "I am a priest of Truth"." We can understand that a man who, like him, lives "in the Kingdom of Truth" does not merely mean to guide others to an understanding, but that he intended to force them to it. Thus, he could give one of his writings the t.i.tle, A Radiantly Clear Report to the Larger Public Concerning the Real Essence of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Force the Readers to Understand. Fichte is a personality who believes that, in order to walk life"s course, he has no need of the real world and its facts; rather, he keeps his eyes riveted on the world of idea. He holds those in low esteem who do not understand such an idealistic att.i.tude of spirit.
While in the narrow horizon that is given through ordinary experience, people think and judge more objectively and correctly than perhaps ever before, most are, nevertheless, completely confused and dazzled as soon as they are to go even one step further. Where it is impossible to rekindle the once extinguished spark of the higher genius, one has to leave them within the circle of their horizon and, insofar as they are useful and necessary in this circle, one can grant them their value in and for it without curtailment. But when they now demand of us to bring down to their level everything they, themselves, cannot reach up to, when they, for instance, demand that everything printed should be useful as a cookbook, or as a textbook of arithmetic, or as a book of general regulations and orders, and then decry everything that cannot be used in such a fashion, then they are very wrong indeed.
We know as well, and possibly better than they, that ideals cannot be presented in the real world. What we maintain,
however, is that the reality has to be judged by them, to be modified through those who feel the necessary strength for it within themselves. Suppose they could not convince themselves of this necessity. Then they would lose very little of what they are by nature anyway, and humanity would lose nothing at all. Their decision would merely make clear that they alone are not counted on in the scheme of providence for mankind"s perfection. Providence will doubtless continue to pursue its course; we commend those people, however, to the care of a kind nature, to supply them in due time with rain and sunshine, with wholesome food and an undisturbed circulation of their gastric juices, at the same time endowing them with clever thoughts!
Fichte wrote these words in the preface to the publication of the lectures in which he had spoken to the students of Jena on the Destination of the Scholar. Views like those of Fichte have their origin in a great energy of the soul, giving sureness for knowledge of world and life. Fichte had blunt words for all those who did not feel the strength in themselves for such a sureness. When the philosopher, Reinhold, ventured the statement that the inner voice of man could also be in error, Fichte replied, "You say the philosopher should entertain the thought that he, as an individual, could also be mistaken and that he, therefore, could and should learn from others. Do you know whose thought mood you are describing with these words? That of a man who has never in his whole life been really convinced of something." To this vigorous personality, whose eyes were entirely directed to the inner life, it was repugnant to search anywhere else for a world conception, the highest aim man can obtain, except in his inner life. "All culture should be the exercise of all faculties toward the one purpose of complete freedom, that is to say, of the complete independence from everything that is not we, ourselves, our pure Self (reason, moral law), for only this is ours. . . ."
This is Fichte"s judgment in his Contributions Toward the Corrections of the Public Judgments Concerning the French Revolution, which appeared in 1793. Should not the most valuable energy in man, his power of knowledge, be directed toward this one purpose of complete independence from everything that is not we, ourselves? Could we ever arrive at a complete independence if we were dependent in our world conception on any kind of being? If it had been predetermined by such a being outside ourselves of what nature our soul and our duties are, and that we thereby procured a knowledge afterwards out of such an accomplished fact? If we are independent, then we must be independent also with regard to the knowledge of truth. If we receive something that has come into existence without our help, then we are dependent on this something. For this reason, we cannot receive the highest truths. We must create them, they must come into being through us. Thus, Fichte can only place something at the summit of his world conception that obtains its existence through ourselves. When we say about a thing of the external world, "It is," we are doing so because we perceive it. We know that we are recognizing the existence of another being. What this other being is does not depend on us. We can know its qualities only when we direct our faculty of perception toward it. We should never know what "red," "warm," "cold" is, if we did not know it through perception. We cannot add anything to these qualities of the thing, nor can we subtract anything from them. We say, "They are." What they are is what they tell us. This is entirely different in regard to our own existence.
Man does not say to himself, "It is," but, "I am." He says, thereby, not only that he is, but also what he is, namely, an "I." Only another being could say concerning me, "It is." This is, in fact, what another being would have to say, for even in the case that this other being should have created me, it could not say concerning my existence, "I am." The statement, "I am," loses all meaning if it is not uttered by the being itself
that speaks about its own existence. There is, therefore, nothing in the world that can address me as "I" except myself.
This recognition of myself as an "I," therefore, must be my own original action. No being outside myself can have influence on this.
At this point Fichte found something with respect to which he saw himself completely independent of every "foreign" ent.i.ty.
A G.o.d could create me, but he would have to leave it to myself to recognize myself as an "I." I give my ego-consciousness to myself. In this way, Fichte obtained a firm point for his world conception, something in which there is certainty. How do matters stand now concerning the existence of other beings? l ascribe this existence to them, but to do so I have not the same right as with myself. They must become part of my "I" if I am to recognize an existence in them with the same right, and they do become a part of myself as I perceive them, for as soon as this is the case, they are there for me. What I can say is only, my "self" feels "red," my "self" feels "warm." Just as truly as I ascribe to myself an existence, I can also ascribe it to my feeling, to my sensation. Therefore, if I understand myself rightly, I can only say, I am, and I myself ascribe existence also to an external world.
For Fichte, the external world lost its independent existence in this way: It has an existence that is only ascribed to it by the ego, projected by the ego"s imagination. In his endeavor to give to his own "self" the highest possible independence, Fichte deprived the outer world of all self-dependence. Now, where such an independent external world is not supposed to exist, it is also quite understandable if the interest in a knowledge concerning this external world ceases. Thereby, the interest in what is properly called knowledge is altogether extinguished, for the ego learns nothing through its knowledge but what it produces for itself. In all such knowledge the human ego holds soliloquies, as it were, with
itself. It does not transcend its own being. It can do so only through what can be called living action. When the ego acts, when it accomplishes something in the world, then it is no longer alone by itself, talking to itself. Then its actions flow out into the world. They obtain a self-dependent existence. I accomplish something and when I have done so, this something will continue to have its effect, even if I no longer partic.i.p.ate in its action. What I know has being only through myself, what I do, is part and parcel of a moral world order independent of myself. But what does all certainty that we derive from our own ego mean compared to this highest truth of a moral world order, which must surely be independent of ourselves if existence is to have any significance at all? All knowledge is something only for the ego, but this world order must be something outside the ego. It must be, in spite of the fact that we cannot know anything of it. We must, therefore, believe it.