Fichte's Theory of Individuality
THEME
Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre lends itself as apparently no other philosophy of mind to the extraction or extrapolation of a theory of individuality. Moreover it proves possible to marry the key concepts on which my essay concentrates to current neurophysiological thinking on how memories are laid down and retrieved. Accordingly it is those nuptials that this essay attempts to perform.
PART I
The world in my mind
The student of Descartes might be brought up short by Fichte’s ‘revision’ of the cogito statement: “I am I”. Soon it becomes apparent that this ‘I’ does not think:
The primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of human knowledge . . . is an act (‘Tathandlung’) which does not and cannot appear among the empirical states of our consciousness, but rather lies at its basis and alone makes it possible. [I,91]
Thus begins his effort to “complete” Kant’s system; for although the old man growled “God preserve us from friends like these”, it cannot be denied that the Critiques *presuppose* a fully-formed mind and may therefore be said to have turned a blind eye to some mandatory prior midwifery.
Fichte’s solution conceives of the ‘Ich’ as essentially an act — as an amorphous consciousness brimful with psychic energy seeking instantiation as a finite thinking being. Unlike the cartesian self, the fichtean ‘Ich’ is initially a self in abstracto [I, 96 & 97], the principle of activity in all purity and lacking all predicates [I, 110].
Accordingly what the ‘Ich’ can experience in this state is nothing remotely akin to the cogito, but rather a freudian ‘oceanic feeling’ of limitless being. From this emerges the desire to ‘posit’ itself, which can mean nothing other than a striving for self-consciousness. Thus,
The pure self-reverting activity of the Self is a striving . . . This boundless striving, carried to infinity, is the condition of the possibility of any object whatsoever: no striving, no object. [I, 262].
Echoes of Goethe’s apophthegm, “Im Anfang war die Tat”, itself a sovereign mind’s correction of the evangelical “In the beginning was the word”. Agency precedes the self-consciousness which commands words.
But an ‘Ich’, wanting to become a ‘Self’, needs correlation to an ‘Other’. Activity, whether mental or physical, necessarily implies the existence of a correlated external reality in relation to which we think and act and which comprises the theatre where these relational activities are enacted.
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