Commentary on Fichte's “The Illegality of the Unauthorised ... - uoltj

164 university of ottawa law & technology journal www.uoltj.ca
introduces distinctions into what is present as a unity within ordinary consciousness
and thereby dissolves this whole into its components. 98
According to Fichte, Kant had a passive understanding of perception.
For Kant, perception is the result of “things in themselves” that are ultimately
unknowable acting on our sensory apparatus. However, Fichte held a different
view. For him, the object, the “not-I,” limits the activity of the I. The “I” only
perceives itself as an intellectual intuition that is part of every sensible intuition.
As a result, Fichte does not posit a Kantian “thing in itself,” since it is from within
the experience of the “I” that the “I” comes to understand the necessity of
something other than it. As Fichte explains in the Foundations of the Entire Science
of Knowledge, the existence of external things is corroborated, not through the
fact of passive receptivity of sensory perceptions caused by it, but rather through
a limitation of the self, “some check on the self.” The “impossibility of further
extension [of the self] would [. . .] delimit [. . .]; it would not set bounds to the
activity of the self; but would give [the self] the task of setting bounds to itself.” 99
How does this help us to understand Fichte’s view that ideas are unique?
Knowledge is created through the interplay of the self and the limitation on the
self represented by the not-self (i.e. the object). These are unified through our
imagination. This process of unification is unique to each individual because it
is a constant process of unification with the unique imprint of each person. This
is the origin of the uniqueness of an individual’s ideas. To follow this argument,
we must understand that for Fichte, knowledge is the result of a synthesis of the
activity of the “I” and of the “not-I”. This synthesis is brought about through our
imagination. 100 The power of the imagination is to unite the infinity of the self
with the finitude of the object, which limits the power of the self to act. Fichte
describes this interplay as follows:
This interplay of the self, in and with itself, whereby it posits itself at once as finite
and infinite—an interplay that consists, as it were, in self-conflict, and is selfreproducing,
in that the self endeavors to unite the irreconcilable, now attempting
to receive the infinite in the form of the finite, now, baffled, positing it again
outside the latter, and in that very moment seeking once more to entertain it
under the form of finitude—this is the power of imagination. 101
The imagination is constantly synthesizing the “I” and the “not-I.” In Fichte’s view,
the boundary between the “I” and the “not-I” is never fixed and is constantly
changing. For if the boundary did not shift, the “I” would completely determine
the totality (i.e. the synthesis of the subject and object), and so the passivity of
the “I” in encountering the “not-I” as limit would be completely illusory, and
the “I” would be the complete ground of all perception. As a result, the limit
on the “I” represented by the “not-I” is a real limit, and so the synthesis of the
98. Fichte, “Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre,” supra note 97 at pp. 48–49.
99. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge,” in Peter Heath and John Lachs,
eds. and trans., Fichte: Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) with the First and Second Introductions
(Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970) 89–287 at p. 189. First published in 1794 as Grundlage der gesamten
Wissenschaftslehre.
100. Fichte, Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, supra note 99 at p. 193.
101. Fichte, Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, supra note 99 at p. 193.