3. The More Important of the Followers of Fichte.

On the one hand, in respect of the content which the ego reaches in the philosophy of Fichte, the complete absence of spirituality, the woodenness, and, to put it plainly, the utter foolishness therein evidenced, strike us too forcibly to allow us to remain at his standpoint; our philosophic perception likewise tells us of the one-sidedness and deficiencies of the principle, as also of the evident necessity that the content should prove to be what it is. But on the other hand self-consciousness was therein posited as reality or essence — not as a foreign, alien self-consciousness, but as ego — a signification which all possess, and which finds an answer in the actuality of all. The Fichtian standpoint of subjectivity has thus retained its character of being unphilosophically worked out, and arrived at its completion in forms pertaining to sensation which in part remained within the Fichtian principle, while they were in part the effort — futile though it was — to got beyond the subjectivity of the ego.

a. Friedrich Von Schlegel.

In Fichte's case the limitation is continually reappearing; but because the ego feels constrained to break through this barrier, it reacts against it, and gives itself a resting place within itself; this last ought to be concrete, but it is a negative resting-place alone. This first form, Irony, has Friedrich von Schlegel as its leading exponent. The subject here knows itself to be within itself the Absolute, and all else to it is vain; all the conclusions which it draws for itself respecting the right and good, it likewise knows how to destroy again. It can make a pretence of knowing all things, but it only demonstrates vanity, hypocrisy, and effrontery. Irony knows itself to be the master of every possible content; it is serious about nothing, but plays with all forms. The other side is this, that subjectivity has cast itself into religious subjectivity. The utter despair in respect of thought, of truth, and absolute objectivity, as also the incapacity to give oneself any settled basis or spontaneity of action, induced the noble soul to abandon itself to feeling and to seek in Religion something fixed and steadfast; this steadfast basis, this inward satisfaction, is to be found in religious sentiments and feelings. This instinct impelling us towards something fixed has forced many into positive forms of religion, into Catholicism, superstition and miracle working, in order that they may find something on which they can rest, because to inward subjectivity everything fluctuates and wavers. With the whole force of its mind subjectivity tries to apply itself to what is positively given, to bend its head beneath the positive, to cast itself, so to speak, into the arms of externality, and it finds an inward power impelling it so to do.

b. Schleiermacher.

On the other hand the ego finds in the subjectivity and individuality of the personal view of things the height of all its vanity — its Religion. All the various individualities have God within themselves. Dialectic is the last thing to arise and to maintain its place. As this is expressed for philosophic self-consciousness, the foreign intellectual world has lost all significance and truth for ordinary culture; it is composed of three elements, a deity pertaining to a time gone by, and individualized in space and existence, a world which is outside the actuality of self-consciousness, and a world which had yet to appear, and in which self-consciousness would first attain to its reality. The spirit of culture has deserted it, and no longer recognizes anything that is foreign to self-consciousness. In accordance with this principle, the spiritual living essence has then transformed itself into self-consciousness, and it thinks to know the unity of spirit immediately from itself, and in this immediacy to be possessed of knowledge in a poetic, or at least a prophetic manner. As regards the poetic manner, it has a knowledge of the life and person of the Absolute immediately, by an intuition, and not in the Notion, and it thinks it would lose the whole as whole, as a self-penetrating unity, were it not to express the same in poetic form; and what it thus expresses poetically is the intuition of the personal life of self-consciousness. But the truth is absolute motion, and since it is a motion of forms and figures [Gestalten], and the universe is a kingdom of spirits, the Notion is the essence of this movement, and likewise or each individual form; it is its ideal form [Form] and not the real one, or that of figure [Gestalt]. In the latter case necessity is lost sight of; individual action, life and heart, remain within themselves, and undeveloped; and this poetry vacillates betwixt the universality of the Notion and the determinateness and indifference of the figure; it is neither flesh nor fish, neither poetry nor philosophy. The prophetic utterance of truths which claim to be philosophical, thus belongs to faith, to self-consciousness, which indeed perceives the absolute spirit in itself, but does not comprehend itself as self-consciousness, since it places absolute reality above Knowledge, beyond self-conscious reason, as was done by Eschenmayer and Jacobi. This uncomprehending, prophetic manner of speech affirms this or that respecting absolute existence as from an oracle, and requires that each man should find the same immediately in his own heart. The knowledge of absolute reality becomes a matter pertaining to the heart; there are a number of would-be inspired speakers, each of whom holds a monologue and really does not understand the others, excepting by a pressure of the hands and betrayal of dumb feeling. What they say is mainly composed of trivialities, if these are taken in the sense in which they are uttered; it is the feeling, the gesture, the fulness of the heart, which first gives them their significance; to nothing of more importance is direct expression given. They outbid one another in conceits of fancy, in ardent poetry. But before the Truth vanity turns pale, spitefully sneering it sneaks back into itself. Ask not after a criterion of the truth, but after the Notion of the truth in and for itself; on that fix your gaze. The glory of Philosophy is departed, for it presupposes a common ground of thoughts and principles — which is what science demands — or at least of opinions. But now particular subjectivity was everything, each individual was proud and disdainful as regards all others. The conception of independent thought — as though there could be a thought which was not such (Vol. I. p. 60) — is very much the same; men have, it is said, to bring forth a particularity of their own, or else they have not thought for themselves. But the bad picture is that in which the artist shows himself; originality is the production of what is in its entirety universal. The folly of independent thought is that it results in each bringing forth something more preposterous than another.

c. Novalis.

Subjectivity signifies the lack of a firm and steady basis, but likewise the desire for such, and thus it evermore remains a yearning. These yearnings of a lofty soul are set forth in the writings of Novalis. This subjectivity does not reach substantiality, it dies away within itself, and the standpoint it adopts is one of inward workings and fine distinctions; it signifies an inward life and deals with the minutiæ of the truth. The extravagances of subjectivity constantly pass into madness; if they remain in thought they are whirled round and round in the vortex of reflecting understanding, which is ever negative in reference to itself.

d. Fries, Bouterweck, Krug.

Yet a last form of subjectivity is the subjectivity of arbitrary will and ignorance. It maintained this, that the highest mode of cognition is an immediate knowledge as a fact of consciousness; and that is so far right. The Fichtian abstraction and its hard understanding has a repellent effect on thought; slothful reason allowed itself to be told the result of the philosophy of Kant and Jacobi, and renounced all consistent thought, all construction. This arbitrariness gave itself entire liberty — the liberty of the Tabagie - but in doing so it regarded itself from a poetic or prophetic point of view, as we have just seen (pp. 508, 509). Then it was both more sober and more prosaic, and thus brought the old logic and metaphysic once more into evidence, though with this modification that they are made facts of consciousness. Thus Fries turns back to the faith of Jacobi in the form of immediate judgments derived from reason, and dark conceptions incapable of utterance. He wished to improve the critique of pure reason by apprehending the categories as facts of consciousness; anything one chooses can in such a case be introduced. Bouterweck speaks of “The virtue, the living nature of power, the fact that subject and object are regarded as one, that is as absolute virtue. With this absolute virtue we have all Being and action, namely the eternal, absolute and pure unity; in one word we have grasped the world within us and we have grasped ourselves in the world, and that indeed not through conceptions and conclusions, but directly through the power which itself constitutes our existence and our rational nature. To know the All, or indeed to know God in any way, is however, impossible for any mortal.” Krug wrote a “Groundwork of Philosophy,” setting forth a “Transcendental Synthesis — that is a transcendental realism and a transcendental idealism inseparably bound together.” It is an “original, transcendental synthesis of the real and the ideal, the thinking subject and the corresponding outer world;” this transcendental synthesis must “be recognized and asserted without any attempt being made at explaining it.”

1. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (Leipzig, 1794), Preface, p. xii. 2. Fichte's Leben und Briefwechsel, edited by his son, Pt. I. pp. 3, 6, 24 seq.; 38 seq.; 142, 189; 337, 338, 348, 349, 353, 354, 358-364; Pt. II. pp. 140-142; Pt. I. pp. 370-372, 442-448, 455; 518, 540; 578. 3. Fichte's posthumous works, which were not published until after Hegel's death, nevertheless show that the writer in his lectures at the Berlin University likewise worked out scientifically this newly developed point of view in his philosophy; Fichte made a beginning in this regard even in the brochure which appeared in 1810: “Die Wissenschaftslehre in ihrem allgemeinen Umrisse” (v. Michelet: Geschichte der letzten Systeme der Philosophie, Pt. I. pp. 441, 442). [Editor's note.] 4. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 10-12. 5. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 13, 14. 6. Fichte: Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre (Weimar, 1794), p. 12. 7. Fichte: Grundlage der ges. Wissenschaftsl., Preface, pp. x., xi. 8. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 184, 185. 9. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, p. 3. 10. Cf. Fichte: Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 13-17, 19-39, 50-52. 11. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 4, 5. 12. Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 23, 5, 15, 17, 8. 13. Fichte: Grundlage der ges. Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 17, 19-22. 14. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 34, 31, 23, 27-30 (52), 14, 18. 15. Ibidem, pp. 52-56, 74. 16. Fichte's Anweisung zum seligen Leben, pp. 80-82. 17. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, p. 57. 18. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 78, 79. 19. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 60, 67, 59, 76. 20. Ibidem, pp. 121, 122. 21. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 194-197, 204, 221, 222. 22. Ibidem, p. 228. 23. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 225, 229, 232. 24. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 233, 238, 239. 25. Fichte: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 302, 246, 247. 26. Ibidem, p. 273. 27. Fichte: Ueber den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung (Fichte's Leben, Part II.), p. 111. 28. Fichte: Verantwortungsschreiben gegen die Anklage des Atheismus, pp. 51, 53. 29. Fichte: Grundlage des Naturrechts (Jena und Leipzig, 1796), Part I. pp. 55-71. 30. Ibidem, pp. 78-82. 31. Fichte: Grundlage des Naturrechts, Part II. p. 21. 32. Rixner: Handbuch d. Gesch. d. Phil. Vol. III., § 192, p. 416; Fichte: Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten (Berlin, 1806), pp. 4, 5, 15, 25-27. 33. Rixner: Handbuch d. Gesch. d. Phil. Vol. III. § 158, pp. 350, 351; Fries: Neue Kritik d. Vernunft (First edition, Heidelberg, 1807), Vol. I. pp. 75, 281, 284, 343; 206. 34. Rixner: Handbuch d. Gesch. d. Phil. Vol. III. § 156, pp. 347, 348; cf. Bouterweck's Apodiktik (1799), Part II. pp. 206-212. 35. Krug: Entwurf eines neuen Organon der Philosophie (Meissen, 1801), pp. 75, 76; Rixner: Handbuch d. Geschichte d. Philosophie, Vol. III. § 157, p. 349.