Fichtean Nonidentity: Faith’s Necessity in the face of Origin and Death

Introduction

            From the “great man theory” to critiques of political leaders’ ‘cult of personalities’ to even the Enlightenment-driven naturalist evolutionism for technology, the human species seems to be always tethered to some supreme figure in relation to any notion of ‘progress’ in their history. An interesting observation of humanity’s progression in relation to such worship or ‘faith’ is this: the general trend of polytheism descending towards a singular, even hidden, god in the post-war Enlightenment era.[1] However, even in a world of assumed scientific explanations for almost all phenomena, I believe there to be two vital phenomena that cannot be explained. These two phenomena are death and the origin of the universe (“God”) and are epitomic of German Idealist Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s project of a Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) that necessitates such faith—specifically faith in the ‘not-self’. Thus, I will argue that the current era of Enlightenment dogmatism is distinct from its ‘predecessors’ as a hypocritical form of faith in something these worshippers see as untouchable by religion (or anything they see as contra-science dogma). Thus, the exemplary phenomena of death and origin will be probed rigorously because their content contradicts Enlightenment dogma’s supposed non-faith through a Fichtean critique. Through an analysis of Fichte’s last chapter “Faith” (Glaube)[2] in the Vocation of Man and a world-historical critique of Enlightenment dogmatism, I argue the necessity of faith in the ‘not-self’ and its negativity, what I call Fichtean nonidentity, for not only positivistic science, but life itself.

The World-Historical and Fichtean Communism

            The notion of a great leader culminating or congealing the precipice of reason in humanity is commonly linked to Hegel’s Geist (Absolute Spirit or Knowing) and popularized by the likes of Alexandre Kojève and Francis Fukuyama as the so-called “end of history.” However, the kernel of such a concept can be found in Fichte’s Vocation of Man where he ends the more ‘accessibly written’ version of the Science of Knowledge with an aside about the world-historical. After informally reconstructing his three principles,[3] the conclusion derived from them is the ethical demand or obligation in which one must pursue with their freedom to act or will. It is “the absolute demand for a better world,” culminating as a general drive of individuals that becomes a world-historical totality “that resounds in my [Fichte’s] inner being: it is impossible that things should remain as they are, everything must, oh it must, become different and better.”[4] A criticism that must be raised here is the Western, Colonialist perspective Fichte is writing in, effectively justifying the conquering of the global south and First Nations for the sake of spreading ‘reason’ or the Enlightenment. This was not specific to Fichte as Hegel was notorious for associating Geist with the Prussian State and Napoleon.[5] Nevertheless, I see merit that can be extracted from Fichte’s insight on the world-historical as a futural, utopian trajectory that advocates for the use of one’s will or freedom for the moral good of the community.[6] I shall call this Fichtean communism.

            Fichtean communism is the infinitude postulated into pure futurity as history, obligating man to the vocation of moral action and community. This definition is strikingly similar to a young, humanist Marx but in some ways exceeds both him and Hegel. I say this as Fichte is essentially against the notion of an ‘end of history’ as he says this about the ‘present situation of mankind’: “I simply cannot think of it as mankind’s whole and final destiny. If it were, then everything would be a dream and deception; and it would not be worth the trouble of having lived.”[7] This is in complete opposition to any type of Hegelian ‘end of history,’ whether it be Fukuyama’s claim of capitalist liberal democracy or Marx’s “positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement… Communism [as] the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”[8] However, Fichte’s open-ended futurity poses some problems, which is especially built upon in The Foundations of Natural Right. This is simply the subjective nature of the ‘morally good’ if Fichte’s system is confined to the internal self. This can be seen in individual freedoms culminating in this world-historical communism (more similar to Marx’s later definition of communism as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”[9]) is rooted in the fact that one does “not feel at home in the present…[they are] repelled by it. [One’s] whole life incessantly flows toward the future and better state of things.”[10] Morality is completely subjective if it is asserted as this natural tendency in all humans and thus, Fichte falls into the danger of an aimless, subjectivist existentialism in which humans just voluntarily restrict their freedoms because they sympathize with others (i.e., grasp the subjectivity that others have just like them).[11] Hegel best presents a critique of this picture.

            In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel critiques Fichte for not having a conception of totality, which is rendered by the fact that freedom and moral good are purely internal to the subject just as everything is for Fichte. In Hegel’s view, Fichte is doing merely a formalist, partial Idealism in so far as “Fichte’s formal cognition, transforming the negatively given into something positive, does not begin with the whole, but processed from the part to other parts; so it cannot transcend its partiality.”[12] The upshot of Hegel’s critique is that without a notion of the totality, then the web of intersubjective accountability of moral action is not necessary but voluntary. This would support the prior subjectivist critique, implying that Fichte’s world must be chaotic as all individuals have different notions of the ‘moral good’ and act accordingly to it. Such a critique is bolstered even more by the fact that Fichte focuses too much on the subject and not as much on the object; that is why Hegel criticizes him for essentially replacing the Noumena with the self and not apprehending that the subject can only exist because of the object—the self exists because of its opposition and interrelation with the other.[13] However, I believe Fichte can escape these critiques, nullifying the relevance of them to at least his system, by seeing the validity of moral subjectivity in Fichte. Even if Fichte derives moral law from his description of freedom’s development and function in man,[14] it does not mean there needs to be an absolute objectivity to the laws but merely a general objectivity. By absolute objectivity, I mean there isn’t a scripture of the laws imprinted in each person’s mind, rather it functions more like a web of values or norms growing out of the same seed: the recognizing of the other as a free being just like oneself and thus, to not violate theirs. Thus, Fichte’s ‘formalism’ is actually advantageous in outlining the functions of morality as its ‘contentless’ nature actually allows it to give a more dynamic description of morality. Therefore, Fichte’s picture of the world-historical is relatively more advanced than Hegel’s or early Marx’s in both its particulars (subjective moralism) and its universality (history without an ‘end,’ or hard lines of demarcation).

The Final God: The Enlightenment

            After such a discussion on Fichte’s view of the inherently human faculty (reason as activity as freedom) in both the particular and the universal, one question arises: where does religion or faith come into this theory? After all, the entire last section of the Vocation of Man is titled ‘Faith,’ and everything I have reconstructed and argued for so far is extremely scientific and reason-based, which makes sense for a Science of Knowledge.[15] However, faith intervenes very similarly in Fichte as it does in Hegel; Geist, or the world-historical progression of human reason, as God. He advocates for humanity’s “united power against the one common opponent who still remains—recalcitrant, uncultivated nature… Every advance made by a human being will be progress for mankind… each will truly love every other as himself, as a component part of that great self.”[16] In this unity of humans, he finally asserts the existence of God: “this purpose would not really be ours but the purpose of that unknown power… Our inner moral law would be empty and superfluous and would simply not befit a being which is incapable of more and is not destined to something higher.”[17] He continues in similar argumentation, calling for “the present life in relation to a future one, is a life in faith,”[18] and, finally, the Geist-esque upshot:

…we all see the same sensible world depends on this agreement about feeling, intuition, and laws of thought. This is a correspondent incomprehensible limitation of the finite rational beings of our species, and just in this, that they are correspondingly limited, do they become one species. So answers the philosophy of bare pure knowledge, and must stop with this as its final answer… Our reciprocal freedom—this agreement is brought about by the One Eternal Infinite Will. Our belief in this world, which I considered above, as belief in our duty, is really faith in It, Its reason, in Its fidelity…That eternal will is thus surely the creator of the world.[19]

Thus, like Geist, world-historical progress can be applied to God and reason simultaneously in this theorem, which can retroactively affirm any religion or so-called ‘precipice of human development,’ that can be used in a dangerously teleological fashion). However, the belief in a ‘supernatural unity’ has been largely discarded in the Western world now, which Fichte could not have predicted—this is Enlightenment dogmatism: the worshipping of one’s narcissistic superiority of their trust in ‘science’ to the implied inferiority of faith.  

            The Enlightenment progressed against the very ideal that birthed it. Instead of attaining a world of more ‘enlightened’ reason, it became the worst form of its opposite—the fear of the unknown.[20] The promise of positivistic empiricism conquering all knowledge failed, or deceived some unfortunate few ultra-dogmatists, propelling the convenient tool of ‘bourgeois equivalence’ of the ‘financialization’ of everyday life to the forefront of society.[21] This tool is the equalizing common denominator of money—a real abstraction[22]—that negates all qualities of things into their exchange values dictated by another God called ‘the market.’ The Enlightenment wants to discard all that is unquantifiable as ‘not knowledge.’ Thus, faith in science has no voluntary—or even involuntary—existence as the scientific dogmatists believe ontologically in their supposed non-faith; they cannot imagine anything outside the system they have constructed. This has the danger of falling into a determinism or—more importantly—the potential nihilism in the rejection of unquantifiable knowledge. The totalitarian system of scientific dogmatism ends up relegating unquantifiable knowledge (like religion and art) to a “special, knowledge-free zone…any deviation of thought from the business of manipulating the actual, any stepping outside of the jurisdiction of existence” is a violation of enlightenment dogma and thus, illegitimate knowledge.[23] Enlightenment dogmatism is the absolute unconscious, narcissistic faith in non-faith (supposed ‘science’). It is the utmost hypocritical non-faith that is, accordingly, the strongest form of faith; such hypocrisy is what Fichte can resolve and effectively critique through the role of the necessity of faith in his project of a science of knowledge.

Fichtean Faith & the Science of Knowledge

Fichte’s commentary on faith’s necessity for understanding the world and thus, science is a perfect response to Enlightenment dogmatism. Essentially, his notion of nonidentity is that antithesis requires synthesis, but synthesis also requires antithesis.[24] This means that nothing can be opposed without attempting to equate them at first, but also that nothing can be equated unless the elements on each side can be seen as separate.[25] What Fichte ends up concluding is that a science of knowledge must be built on the foundation that all one can know with absolute certainty is that one is perceiving their own perception of the world—not a universally perceived external world—they always-already know their self-conscious.

The ‘five senses,’ or all sensible capabilities, always-already combine and create a certain changing perception of the world that is separate from you and objectively unknowable to you. Here, Fichte is basically making the philosophical conclusion of the obnoxious child who constantly asks their parent, “Why?” When a parent says anything to their child (for instance, telling them to do a chore), this example I’m referring to is when the child responds continuously with ‘why’ until the limit is hit (usually, as ‘because I said so’ from the parent). However, Fichte is directing this ‘obnoxious curiousness’ toward reality itself, and with this infinitely critical skepticism, he finds that one cannot attain anything about a ‘material world’ external to the self because it is always-already constructed by the perceiver. This qualitative phenomenon going on in all our lives proves nothing about the external world except for the fact that something is happening—that something is: change. Fichte calls it succession.[26] All we perceive can be an illusion, but the one thing that is undoubtable is that the illusions, or perceptions, are changing, transforming, and nothing stays completely static from one instance to the next. Thus, he asserts the only conception of the external world is one of pure ‘forces’— “a force outside of me,” he says.[27] For example, the world that is constructed by us is completely different than even a squirrel and even more so for a tree. Necessarily in Fichte’s view, one must have faith in the sensible world, of each other as real beings, etc., as a coagulation of forces before any system of reality can be built whether it be science or religion.

The mass and its properties are themselves the effect and expression of the inner force. This force has two effects. One through which it maintains itself and gives itself this particular shape in which it appears. And another effect upon me, since it affects me in a particular way.[28]

Thus, the upshot of this Fichtean faith is that all is structured by the mind. From all the laws of mythology or religion that explain the world to that of science and mathematical quantification, they all rely on abstractions and concepts (mediated by and only existing through negation)[29] by man that are necessarily created by language and reason.

Origin: Faith is God and God is Faith

            With Fichtean faith in mind, one must authentically and intentionally place faith in the world as given, as existent for a Science of Knowledge to begin—its only axiom.

Fichte says:

Every knowledge presupposes something still higher as its foundation, and this ascent has no end. It is faith, this voluntary acquiescence in the view which naturally presents itself to us because only on this view can we fulfill our vocation…Faith is no knowledge, but a decision of the will to recognize knowledge.[30]

I will assert that this faith in knowledge, in knowing anything with certainty in this world, is more than just a ‘decision’ as Fichte states. It is the ontology of realism that everybody already accepts. In the argument that Existentialism is the completion of German Idealism,[31] this ontology of realism is precisely that which lies outside of the moment of existential crisis or philosophical reflection. Only by stopping to think and trace back all one’s abstractions, thoughts, and beliefs to their origins will one realize that they cannot find a satisfactory answer and will be left in anguish. However, it is impossible to stay in this state of crisis or reflection; one undoubtedly returns to a world of realism where they believe their perception is that of the external world, walking on the ground, seeing trees pass by, etc. Even if it were true that the external world exists exactly the way one perceives it, there is also nothing proving the isolation of the self or one’s separation from everything else. It is only through negation that objects can be seen as separate and thus, the world could truly just be an amorphous mass that humans are merely a part or appendage of. Consciousness could then be the mere delusion of individuality as it is a fairly Western concept as many Eastern cultures before the Enlightenment and imperialism emphasized the importance of interdependence and community (or a oneness with all others and even nature itself). Nevertheless, if negation is a mere illusion, then there is the possibility of pantheism—that all is God if God is the origin of all (the creator) and necessarily and definitively omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.

            Beyond pantheism is one more topic to address that is tantamount to ‘science’ or the Enlightenment’s fear of the unknowable or non-knowledge: death and nothingness. Faith and origin go hand-in-hand for the unknowable. Why are we here at all? Why do we exist at all? Why is there existence or things in the first place? This is precisely Fichte’s point: one must have faith in the origin of the universe if they are to believe anything in their perceptual world. Even with modern science’s ability to trace the beginning of the universe to a centripetal force in a small space that unleashes matter that expands infinitely,[32] what caused it? Why was that packed amount of matter there in the first place?[33] To this extent, faith must be the great unity of the origin being God and God being the origin. Thus, was it possible for there to be nothing before the origin? Here, the problem of nothingness emerges. It is extremely peculiar that humans, or the mere advent of consciousness, can conceive of the idea of ‘nothing.’ This can only validate the fact that people believe in negation. We can think of or imagine ‘nothing’ because we can imagine something being obliterated, negated, and thus, gone—the lack of something. However, even when pointing to empty space, that nothingness is not properly nothing; e.g., it is gas particles, etc.—because there is matter everywhere.

This is why Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre says that nothingness, or the negating faculty, is the first and only novel invention of the human species.[34] Nothingness is consciousness: consciousness is the absolute lack, the emptiness in one’s perceptual modality that can only be affirmed when it is filled with something. One only knows one is conscious when there is an object in their consciousness—there is no other way, for if one has nothing in their consciousness, they are not conscious, or they would not know that they are.[35] Fichte also echoes a negative first act when he says, “consciousness itself is similarly a product of the self’s first original act, its own positing of itself.”[36] Here, the positing is the original act—an assertion of something or, in other words, an abstraction of the self that is the ‘posited self.’ Also, Sartre’s striking similarity with Fichte is best culminated in their shared use of the ‘for-itself’—consciousness is pure ‘for-itself’ since it necessitates an ‘in-itself’ for it to exist. Closing this discussion of nothingness or negativity, here is an example of the eternality or universality of them: If someone commanded you to ‘stop being conscious on will,’ as if it is a faculty you can turn on and off, you will realize it is impossible. Thus, it makes sense for us to believe in negation, to have faith that we are separate thinking subjects with separate objects that we perceive and act upon. However, the ability to negate unfortunately means that one can conceive of the negation of life—death. If the qualitative experience that one strings into a linear narrative and calls ‘life’ can end, there is quantitatively no such method to explain the experience. For death (in the scientific dogmatist’s eyes) as a ‘pitch black’ or ‘forever-sleep’ type state is arguably an experiential personification of death. It is like a person with sight trying to imagine what it is like to be blind from birth—an inevitably fallacious and inaccurate task. Death, in truth, must be a non-experience—it is necessarily neither dynamic nor static, neither spatial nor temporal. One will only know death when they confront it—they cannot and will never know it in their lives since life is precisely temporal, dynamic, and knowable, things that are not possible in death. The non-experience that is death is precisely that which lies outside of reason—it is pure non-reason.

Hence, only faith that such negativities exist—or nothingness in its entirety—is what can allow one to live fully and believe in this world. The multitude of names that will never fully capture this nothingness—non-reason, non-experience, negation, the irrational, the unexplainable, the incomprehensible, the ineffable—is the attempt towards faith in the negative. If scientific dogmatists are to hold to their principles, there is nothing but nihilism and solipsism for them to confront—especially when considering the ideas of origin and death. Thus, faith is actually extremely reasonable—it is the only reasoned response to non-reason. Hence, God is not a strictly defined being because, in the last instance, the universal notion of God(s) is that which is outside or beyond reality and, thus, beyond ‘knowing’ in the proper sense of comprehension. The supernatural exists because, at every juncture in human history, it interjects if there is no more possible explanation to be done.[37] Faith helped mankind prepare for the weather, know when to grow crops, allow people to sympathize, to believe that there is a purpose in ‘being good’ to oneself and others, and so on… Thus, as my personal conclusion for what God is, it must be nonidentity—it is that which is definitively not a positive thing because it is precisely what binds and separates all positive things. The difference but also relationality of all things becomes God—something outside of experience, reason, and all that constitutes our world. If there is to be an origin to ‘everything,’ it must then lie outside what we say is contained in ‘everything.’ Therefore, that is why everyone who is faithful believes in something ‘other-worldly.’ Faith as a practice only has one purpose: to believe in God(s) and thus, God is faith and faith is God. This ultimate tautology only shows the impossibility of one going beyond their own perception—their own world. It is the final attempt to explain the unexplainable. Scientific dogmatists fail to see this completely.

Objections: Linear Time, Eternity, Determinism, and Freedom

            One possible objection to faith as an explanation of the unexplainable, here, is that it is predicated on the assumption of linear time. Since positivistic empiricism is largely the status quo in science today, a principle of causality must be assumed and, thus, the Big Bang is usually discussed as the ‘beginning’ of the universe with the present pushing the timeline of progression. Thus, the possible objection would be that the critique of Enlightenment dogmatism only holds in a system of linear time—which Fichte himself does not even hold. The discussion of ‘Big-Banging’ in footnote 31 is relevant here; Fichte believes himself to hold an extremely similar stance as seen in his discussion on succession and his final claim in the entirety of The Vocation of Man: “So I live and so I am, and so I am unchangeable, firm and complete for all eternity.”[38] First, his discussion on succession is, as I said before, ‘all we know is change,’ making this ‘eternal present’ of experience the only certain truth and thus, an illusion can be created by placing one instance next to the other in memory. This stringing along of instances—each of which is a Kantian potential actualized—seems synonymous with the genesis of perception and thus, we rarely differentiate the two, which ultimately allows for the illusion of linear time.[39] This perfectly complements Fichte’s final claim that one is eternal because if all one knows is the changing present—then it is precisely experience itself, reality itself, and life itself. One is not conscious of their birth because it is precisely non-experience (non-reality, non-life) because one definitively cannot know or experience it because only in life can one experience at all. Thus, death would be a similar phenomenon, as I argued previously, making life itself eternal as eternal experience, and as eternal reality. Therefore, Fichte’s eternal life contradicts the critique of Enlightenment dogmatism because the latter is situated in linear time and my utilization of Fichte is not. Ironically, this means faith is not very necessary for Fichte’s system, which makes sense considering his indictments of atheism and no mention of faith in the Wissenschaftslehre.

            This contradiction is actually not as significant as it may seem; however, a new one emerges in the face of extracting the Eternal from Fichte. First, the contradiction between the eternal and linear time is not significant because I am using Fichtean faith as a tool to critique the internal hypocrisy of ‘scientific dogmatists’ (which, this oxymoronic label is supposed to encapsulate such hypocrisy, too) and thus, the critique itself still stands. However, the new contradiction is the very fact that the Eternal exists for Fichte. Does this not sound like a determinism that wouldn’t allow for one of Fichte's most important notions—the notion of freedom? Fichte’s conception of freedom is two-fold: a macro and micro scale—the world-historical and the individual subject.

Don’t ask history whether men have on the whole become more moral! They have developed an extensive, encompassing, powerful free will, but their situation has made it necessary for them to use this free will almost only for evil.[40]

I am simply active… here my philosophy becomes wholly independent of anything arbitrary, and a product of iron necessity, insofar as the free reason is subject to the latter: a product that is, of practical necessity… The concept of action… is the only concept which unites the two worlds that exist for us, the sensible and the intelligible…action in general, or freedom. The concepts of both right and virtue…are specific limitations of action in general.[41]

Both accounts make Fichte sound like the most humanist idealist, i.e., that humans have a special agency of seemingly absolute ‘free will’ unlike any other organism. This is only more affirmed in The Foundations of Natural Right in which he derives a political philosophy purely from his conception of freedom. Perhaps Fichte did was not dialectical enough, but I personally hold to the Hegelian-influenced notion that freedom only exists in opposition to unfreedom and vice versa.[42] Freedom only exists in the absence of restriction (unfreedom) and thus, this dialectic is necessary for any conception of freedom at all; for if there is no unfreedom, freedom would not need to exist—it would just be act. However, Fichte’s version is more primitive in that the faculty to act on will is congealed in all individuals and all restriction of agency is relegated to the not-self or the other who exercises their agency unto your body. Here, I simply think Fichte is incorrect because his account is harshly one-sided, showing the limits of his ‘subjective idealism’ (in Hegel’s view) not allowing his political philosophy to go further than a measly liberalism in which one ‘attempts best’ voluntarily to not infringe on another’s freedom. This is utterly ahistorical and undialectical—Fichte’s overemphasis on the self lapses in its supposed Kantian merit. Fichtean freedom is one-sided because it simply does not account for the accumulated histories and, thus, institutional structures that are always-already pressuring, bounding, and limiting a subject’s freedom. Thus, the probing of the Eternal revealed Fichte’s weak conception of freedom—does this mean his project falls into a determinism of the Eternal? That one experiences their life ‘forever’ because they can only live in experience and everything outside (pre-birth or death) cannot be lived?

            The final contradiction of Fichte’s argument is two-fold:

(1)   Fichte’s notion of the self being eternal possibly negates his notion of freedom.

(2)   The self, itself, can negate a necessity of the origin as I=I being both subject and object of history, which would make man the Origin itself—or God.[43] 

However, I will argue—in one stroke, against both contradictions—that Fichte’s stance is that faith in the origin is necessary for the notion of the eternal—that man is both free and eternal through and through. Specifically, the content of my upshot is that freedom and the eternal emerge from the same source—faith in the not-self, which is effectively the same as the origin (I will explain why). For problem (1), the eternal is actually not deterministic because the illusion of living ‘forever’ is a façade of linear time—that only through the conception of life having a beginning and an end can this ‘loop’ effect be conceived. The Fichtean eternal is the fact that we can never truly be in the past or future—we are eternally present and thus, eternity is the precondition for life.[44] For if a person grew up on an isolated island, without ever coming into contact with another person, without a seminal part of the not-self—the other—then they would still be eternal but without freedom. The eternal is necessary for freedom but not the contrary. This is because freedom can only exist in relation to the not-self—that freedom exists only because of unfreedom (even though for Fichte, it is not inclusive of structures as stated before), or the possibility that an other has the ability to exercise their will against you. Here is the concept of the ‘external check’(Anstoß) where a subject finds itself through its ‘free efficacy,’ its eternal ability to act.[45] Fichte is able to derive the fact that not only is freedom possible by unfreedom, but that the self as human is only possible by the existence of other humans (that have their own free efficacy and, thus, the ability to enact unfreedom towards the subject):

The human being becomes a human being only among human beings; and since the human being can be nothing other than a human being and would not exist at all if it were not this—it follows that, if there are to be human beings at all, there must be more than one… The concept of the human being is not the concept of the individual—for an individual human being is unthinkable.[46]

The unthinkable individual human returns to the example of the human on the isolated island—they would not have a conception of freedom or humanity (both are linked) because they would merely be an experience. There would be no difference between self and ‘universe’ because the isolated self would functionally be a point of view with limb extensions—like the example of one as the ‘universe making sense of itself.’[47] Thus, the eternal is the grounds on which freedom emerges as the isolated self would still be eternal but without freedom because they are without others.

This fundamental fact of Fichte’s system also resolves problem (2) as the origin is not just the self, it is precisely both not-self and self. The origin that, or God who, created life or the universe is the antitheses, or antagonisms, between elements that allow for their binding—their synthesis. I cannot make this argument in good faith without prefacing the retrospective application of analyses by Hegel and Adorno, but they would not have been able to make their insights on nonidentity, and much of anything else dialectical, without Fichte. Fichte’s definitive leap from Kant was revolutionary because of the positing of the self that presupposes a not-self reciprocally and thus, creating the (post-)modern dialectic as such. Thus, Fichte’s utilization of negation is absolutely novel and is the kernel of why the not-self is the origin, in my interpretation. Negativity is essential here: all objects are posited (negated as a concept) by the subject (positivity is predicated on negativity and vice versa),[48] but entities that cannot be negated are pure negativities like death and the origin, i.e., they cannot be positive—they exist only as false concepts or concepts without concrete objects.[49] Thus, anything that is not concrete, i.e., something that cannot be fully apprehended as a full object can only be explained by pure negativity. This is what I call Ficthean Nonidentity that—along with the invention of contemporary dialectics—he invents the notion of nonidentity, that something can only be known (identified) by their difference (nonidentity) to another thing. The pure essence of nonidentity is clearly negativity, lack, and thus, pure negativity has the essence of negation itself: a missing part of a totality of the knowable—more specifically, what is precisely outside the knowable. This is that which one must have faith in—that one exists, that one is given self-consciousness that they can posit, that one is given their rational and sensible faculties—that one was given an external world. This givenness is unlike that of traditional a priori use of philosophers, rather it is precisely the fact that the prior assumptions of these things collapse into negativity itself. And, as shown prior in the essay, negativity is also relationality and thus, Fichtean God is the nonidentity and, subsequently, negativity itself of all things—the ability to be obliterated at any moment makes the same promise as the fact that the self was thrown into being in the first place and that they will eventually be negated themselves, eventually meet death.

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Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, by Friedrich Engels, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 2nd Revised & Enlarged edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “The German Ideology: Part I.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Revised & Enlarged edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Sarah Richmond. Later prt. edition. Washington Square Press, 2021.

Wolf, Frieder Otto. “Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ Lecture and Lecture Notes.” Presented at the German Philosophy from Kant to Habermas FUBiS Summer 2023 PPT No. 6, Freie Universität Berlin, July 28, 2023.

[1] Generally, this can be seen as the polytheism of the Ancient Asians, Greeks, and Romans being overtaken by the monotheism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the latter finally seeing a perverse existence in today’s society as hyper-political or hyper-ideological communities in the face of a more predominant ‘religion’: scientific dogmatism (also congealed in ‘atheism’ and especially ‘agnosticism’). For a concise genealogy of this, see Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality essays 1 and 2.

[2] Original German Glaube works well with my argument of an authentically faithful science as it generally means ‘belief,’ ‘faith,’ ‘trust,’ etc. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen (Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung, 1800).

[3] Since The Vocation of Man was written for a broader audience, Fichte did not formally number the principles in this book. Instead, the middle section of the book titled “Knowledge” from pages 27 to 65 is an informal, dialogic retelling. For clarity, the three principles are as follows: (1) the self posits its own being—a pre-reflexive self-consciousness, (2) opposition, or negation, emerges from the self being absolutely opposed to the not-self, and (3) within the always-already posited self, there is the posited divisible self (I as subject) opposed to a divisible not-self. J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge: With the First and Second Introductions, ed. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge Cambridgeshire ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 93-110.

[4] Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss, New Ed edition (Indianapolis Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1987), 81.

[5] Frieder Otto Wolf, “Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ Lecture and Lecture Notes” (Lecture, “German Philosophy from Kant to Habermas” FUBiS Summer 2023, PPT No. 6, Freie Universität berlin, July 28, 2023).

[6] The projection of freedom into futurity comes from Fichte’s political philosophy. Specifics will be analyzed later in this paper. J. G. Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, ed. Frederick Neuhouser, trans. Michael Baur, First Edition (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[7] Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 81.

[8] Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, by Friedrich Engels, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd Revised & enlarged edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 84.

[9] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology: Part I,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Revised & enlarged edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 162.

[10] Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 81.

[11] “Present in each of the two beings is the concept that the other is a free being and not to be treated as a mere thing.” Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, 79-80.

[12] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris, First Edition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 161.

[13] Jennifer Ann Bates, “Hegel’s Critique of Fichte Seminar and Seminar Notes” (Germand Idealism: Fichte, Duquesne University, April 17, 2024).

[14] Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, 133-164.

[15] In many ways, my description so far in the paper may support why Fichte was indicted for atheism during his career. Dan Breazeale, “Johann Gottlieb Fichte,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Spring 2012 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2012), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/johann-fichte/.

[16] Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 90.

[17] Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 92.

[18] Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 97.

[19] Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 110. My bolding. -L.D.

[20] “Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown.” Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 1st edition (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2002), 11.

[21] “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into number…is an illusion.” Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 4.

[22] Money is merely an abstraction of value; however, it takes on a dominant form in bourgeois society where it can drastically change the material lives of—mostly—the working class: it is an abstraction that has real effects. See Sohn-Rethel’s work for a furthering of Marxist theory of money.

[23] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 19.

[24] J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge: With the First and Second Introductions, ed. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge Cambridgeshire ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 112.

[25] This is a more reciprocal approach than Adorno’s nonidentity, which actually seems more positive in Fichte’s text, but it makes sense since Adorno indicts Hegel for overemphasizing the positive when the negative is preponderant.

[26] Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 34-35.

[27] Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 57.

[28] Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 57. My italics -L.D.

[29] Concepts and abstractions are partial negations of objects; this will be elaborated fully further into the text.

[30] Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 71.

[31] Jennifer Ann Bates, “Seminar on First Introduction of the Science of Knowledge and Seminar Notes” (German Idealism: Fichte, Duquesne University, January 24, 2024).

[32] Wikipedia, “Big Bang,” in Wikipedia (Wikipedia, February 27, 2024), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Bang&oldid=1210693551.

[33] In a sense, Fichte may fall into the trap of linear time as that must be the assumption he is operating on to need to believe in the origin of the universe. For a counter-example, Hegel’s outlook would be that there is no Big Bang as starting point—we are ‘Big Bang-ing.’ Bates, “Hegel’s Critique of Fichte Seminar and Seminar Notes.”

[34] “Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Sarah Richmond, Later prt. edition (Washington Square Press, 2021), 60.

[35] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 263-285. Especially, page 278.

[36] Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 107.

[37] This is best seen in the Frankfurt School’s notion of mythology’s nonidentity they call mana: It is “everything unknown and alien; it is that which transcends the bounds of experience, the part of things which is more than their immediately perceived existence. What the primitive experiences as supernatural is not a spiritual substance in contradistinction to the material world but the complex concatenation of nature in contrast to its individual link.” Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 10.

[38] Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 123.

[39] Jennifer Ann Bates, “Fichte First Seminar on the ‘Knowledge’ Section of the Vocation of Man” (German Idealism: Fichte, Duquesne University, February 21, 2024).

[40] Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 86.

[41] Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 41-42.

[42] Aphorism “The Fiction of Positive Freedom.” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, Reprint edition (New York: Continuum, 1987), 231-232.

[43] “the self is a necessary identity of subject and object: a subject-object; and is so absolutely, without further mediation.” Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 99. Transposing this onto Fichtean communism or his version of Geist is how I attain my exact formulation.

[44] My notes of Bates’s contribution: “the dialectic generates time since differentiation can only be possible through opposition (like I vs. not-I), so time comes through the differentiation between an instant and the next as concepts.” Jennifer Ann Bates, “Seminar on First Introduction of the Science of Knowledge and Seminar Notes” (German Idealism: Fichte, Duquesne University, January 24, 2024).

[45] Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, 32-33.

[46] Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, 37-38. My bolding. -L.D.

[47] One may argue about the chance of another animal being able to exercise their will on the isolated self, but it would still be nothing like human freedom that contains reason. Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, 3.

[48] See footnote 24.

[49] Adorno especially has interesting insight here on the fact that death is a social construct or social phenomenon, which fits into this Fichtean eternal. See “Dying Today” in: Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 368-373.