The Ego
Feb 24, 2013 8:19:33 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Feb 24, 2013 8:19:33 GMT -5
A more edifying item in the T.L.S. of January the fifteenth is Mr. Adler's review of two books about Fichte. Fichte's was at once the most exhilaratingly original and the most inescapably self-evident of philosophies. But "human nature" ensured that Fichte's windows would nonetheless be shattered by the mob.
"The act by which Fichte's subject establishes itself," explains Mr. Adler, "is an 'intellectual intuition.' The notion originates with Plotinus's and Spinoza's scientia intuitiva; it was formulated by Kant, who [with what impercipience!] denied its possibility; yet it became crucial for Fichte, Schelling, Novalis and Hölderin - who offer subtly different versions. Fichte defines it as follows: 'Intellectual intuition is the immediate consciousness that I act, and of what I do when I act. It is because of this, that it is possible for me to know something because I do it.' From the postulate of the subject 'as its own being,' Fichte advanced to his most radical conclusion; in the words of the Grundlage: 'everything that exists, exists only insofar as it is postulated in the Ego; and there is nothing outside the Ego.' In the more popular language of Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800), the idea is expressed by saying that the world is the product of the subject's imagination.1 This ground-breaking picture breached the limits of traditional philosophy and laid the foundations of German Romanticism." Thus Mr. Adler.
When we read that we immediately forget all about jolly old Hume and jolly old Kant do we not. "It may well be that Fichte is the inventor of an altogether new way of thinking," remarked Novalis.
Note 1: I would add there only that "imagination" is another word for the progressive establishment (logical or not) of the network of definitions and redefinitions that make up language and knowledge - the elements of language are not only words but also our very perceptions of the world around us.
"The act by which Fichte's subject establishes itself," explains Mr. Adler, "is an 'intellectual intuition.' The notion originates with Plotinus's and Spinoza's scientia intuitiva; it was formulated by Kant, who [with what impercipience!] denied its possibility; yet it became crucial for Fichte, Schelling, Novalis and Hölderin - who offer subtly different versions. Fichte defines it as follows: 'Intellectual intuition is the immediate consciousness that I act, and of what I do when I act. It is because of this, that it is possible for me to know something because I do it.' From the postulate of the subject 'as its own being,' Fichte advanced to his most radical conclusion; in the words of the Grundlage: 'everything that exists, exists only insofar as it is postulated in the Ego; and there is nothing outside the Ego.' In the more popular language of Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800), the idea is expressed by saying that the world is the product of the subject's imagination.1 This ground-breaking picture breached the limits of traditional philosophy and laid the foundations of German Romanticism." Thus Mr. Adler.
When we read that we immediately forget all about jolly old Hume and jolly old Kant do we not. "It may well be that Fichte is the inventor of an altogether new way of thinking," remarked Novalis.
Note 1: I would add there only that "imagination" is another word for the progressive establishment (logical or not) of the network of definitions and redefinitions that make up language and knowledge - the elements of language are not only words but also our very perceptions of the world around us.