The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Idealism as an Awakening of the Soul: Johann Gottlieb Fichte

[ 1 ] In his speeches on "Fundamental Features of the Present Age" and "To the German Nation", Johann Gottlieb Fichte seeks to find an account of the spiritual forces at work in the development of humanity. Through the thoughts he expresses in these speeches, he imbues himself with the feeling that the driving force of his world view flows from the innermost nature of the German people. He has the view that he expresses thoughts which the German national soul must express if it is to reveal itself from the core of its spirituality. The way in which Fichte struggled for his world view makes it understandable that this feeling could live in his soul. For the observer of a thinker, it must appear significant to explore the roots belonging to the fruits of his thoughts, which work in the depths of his soul and which are not directly expressed in his thought worlds, but which live as the driving forces in these thought worlds.

[ 2 ] What kind of worldview one has depends on what kind of person one is: Fichte spoke this conviction out of the awareness that all the life instincts of his own personality had to produce the conceptually strong peaks of his worldview as their natural, self-evident fruit. This world view, in whose center of understanding not many want to place themselves, because they consider what they find to be unworldly thoughts, into which it can only be the task of the thinker "by profession" to penetrate. This feeling is understandable for those who approach Fichte's thoughts without philosophical preparation by seeking them out in his works. But it is not strange for those who have the possibility of placing themselves in the full life of these thoughts to imagine that a time will come when it will be possible to cast Fichte's ideas in a form that is comprehensible to anyone who wants to form ideas about the meaning of this life from life. These ideas will then be accessible even to the simplest human mind, which is far removed from what is called philosophical thinking. For they have indeed received their philosophical form from the character which the development of thought assumed in intellectual circles at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but they have their vitality from experiences of the soul which are present in every human being. Certainly, the time has not yet come when such a transfer of Fichte's thoughts from the language of his contemporary philosophy into the general human form of expression would be completely possible. Such things only become possible with the gradual progress of certain types of conception in intellectual life. Just as Fichte himself was compelled to carry his soul experiences to the heights of what is usually called abstract thinking and found cold and alien to life, so it is probably only possible to a limited extent at present to carry these soul experiences down from those heights.

[ 3 ] Fichte struggled for ever new forms of expression for these experiences of the soul from his early youth until death suddenly reached him while he was still a man. In all his struggles, a basic cognitive drive is evident in him. In his own human soul, he wanted to find a living being in which man could not only grasp the basic force of his own existence, but in which, according to its essence, he could also recognize that which weaves and works in nature and in all other extra-human things. The drop of water is a tiny sphere in relation to the sea. But if one recognizes this in its water character, then one also has in this knowledge that of the water character of the whole sea. If something can be found in the human being that can be experienced as a revelation of the innermost weaving of the world, then one can hope to progress to knowledge of the world through deeper self-knowledge.

[ 4 ] On the path that results from this feeling, the development of the worldview took place long before Fichte's time. His life, however, placed him at a significant point in this development. How he received his next impulses from the world views of Spinoza and Kant can be read in many places. However, the way in which he ultimately behaved through the nature of his personality in matters of worldview becomes most vivid when one contrasts him with the thinker who emerged from Roman thought just as much as Fichte emerged from German thought: Descartes (Cartesius. 1596-1650). In Descartes, it becomes clear how the thinker seeks certainty in his knowledge of the world by gaining a firm foothold in self-knowledge. Descartes takes his starting point from doubt about all knowledge of the world. He says to himself: the world in which I live reveals itself in my soul, and I form ideas about the course of things from its revelations. But what guarantees that these ideas of mine really tell me something about the working and weaving of the world? Could it not be that my soul receives certain impressions from things, but that these impressions are so far removed from the things themselves that nothing of the meaning of the world is revealed to me in them? In view of this possibility, may I say: I know this or that about the world? You see, in this sea of doubt, all knowledge can become a dream of the soul for the thinker, and only the one conviction imposes itself on him: that man can know nothing. But for a person for whom the driving force of thinking has become as alive in the soul as the driving force of hunger is alive in the body: for him the conviction that man can know nothing means in the soul what starvation means for the body. All the innermost moods, from the health of the soul in the higher sense to the feeling of "soul salvation", are connected with this.

[ 5 ] In the soul itself, Descartes finds the point on which he can base his conviction: the ideas I form about the course of the world are not a dream; they live a life that is a link in the life of the whole world. Even if I can doubt everything, I cannot doubt one thing, for I would be giving myself the lie to such doubt. Is it not certain that by giving myself over to doubt, I am thinking? I could not doubt if I did not think. It is therefore impossible for me to doubt my own experience in thinking. If I wanted to kill thinking through doubt, it would rise again alive from doubt. My thinking is therefore alive; it is not in a world of dreams; it is in the world of being. If I could believe that everything else, even my own body, only pretends to be being; my thinking does not deceive me. As true as I think, so true am I by thinking. Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" (Cogito ergo sum) resounded from such sentiments. And anyone with an ear for such things will hear the power of this word echoing through the thinkers who followed Descartes right up to Kant.

[ 6 ] It is only with Fichte that this sound stops. If one immerses oneself in his world of thought, if one tries to experience his struggle for a world view, one feels how he also seeks world knowledge in self-knowledge: but one has the feeling that the "I think, therefore I am" could not be the rock on which he believed himself safe in the waves of doubt, which could turn human ideas into a sea of dreams. One senses how Fichte's ability to doubt sits, as it were, in a completely different chamber of the soul than Descartes' when one considers the sentences he wrote in his "The Destiny of Man" (published in 1800): "There is no permanent thing anywhere, neither outside of me nor within me, but only an incessant change. I know of no being anywhere, nor of my own. There is no being. - I myself do not know at all, and am not. Images are: they are the only thing that is there, and they know of themselves in the way of images: - Images that float over without there being anything they float over; that are connected by images of the images, images without anything depicted in them, without meaning and purpose. I myself am one of these images; yes, I myself am not this, but only a confused image of the images. - All reality is transformed into a marvelous dream, without a life that is dreamed of and without a spirit that dreams; into a dream that hangs together in a dream of itself. The looking is the dream; the thinking - the source of all being and all reality that I imagine, my being, my power, my purposes - is the dream of that dream." These thoughts do not force themselves into Fichte's soul like an ultimate truth of existence. He does not really want to see the world as a dream. He only wants to show that all the reasons which man usually gives for the certainty of knowledge cannot stand up before a penetrating gaze, that with these reasons one has no right to regard the ideas which one forms about the world as anything other than dream-formations. And Fichte cannot accept that there is any certainty about being in thinking itself. Why should I say: "I think, therefore I am", since, if I live in a sea of dreams, my thinking can be nothing more than "the dream of the dream"? For Fichte, the impact that brings reality into thoughts about the world must come from a completely different source than mere thinking about the world.

[ 7 ] When Fichte speaks of the fact that the nature of the German people lives in his worldview, this thought becomes understandable if one visualizes the path to self-knowledge that he seeks in contrast to Descartes. This path can be seen as that which Fichte perceives as "German"; and one can contrast him as a wanderer on this path with Descartes, who walks along Romanesque intellectual paths. Descartes seeks a fixed point for self-knowledge; he expects that this fixed point will confront him somewhere. He believes he has found it in thinking. Fichte expects nothing at all from this kind of searching. For, whatever he might find, why should there be a higher certainty than what has already been found? No, there is nothing at all to be found in this way of searching. For it can only lead from image to image; and no image that one encounters can of itself guarantee its existence. Therefore, one must first leave the path through the images completely and only enter it again when one has gained certainty from another side.

[ 8 ] In order to refute the "I think, therefore I am", one must say something seemingly quite simple-minded. However, this is the case with many thoughts that people incorporate into their world view: they are not resolved by far-reaching objections, but by noticing simple facts. One does not underestimate the thinking power of a personality of Descartes' type when one holds up such a simple fact against him. The parable of Columbus' egg remains eternally true. And so it is also true that the "I think, therefore I am" is simply shattered by the fact of sleep. Every human sleep that interrupts thinking does not show that there is no being in thinking, but it does show that "I am, even when I am not thinking". If, therefore, being had to be extracted from thinking, it would in no way vouch for the states of the soul in which thinking ceases. Even if Fichte did not express this turn of thought in this form, it can still be said that the power that lies in this simple fact worked - unconsciously - in his soul and prevented him from taking the path taken by Descartes.

[ 9 ] The basic character of Fichte's feelings led him down a completely different path. His life from childhood onwards reveals this basic character. You only need to allow individual images from this life to appear before your soul to see through it. A significant image from his childhood comes to life. Johann Gottlieb is seven years old. So far, he has been a good learner. In recognition of his diligence, his father gives him the folk book "The Horned Siegfried". The boy is completely absorbed by the book. He somewhat neglects his duties. He becomes aware of this in himself. His father meets him one day as he throws the "Horned Siegfried" into the stream. The boy's whole heart is attached to the book; but how could the heart keep something that distracts him from his duty! Thus the feeling already lives unconsciously in the boy Fichte: man is in the world as an expression of a higher order, which sinks into the soul not through interest in this or that, but through the ways in which he recognizes duty. Here we can see the impulse behind Fichte's attitude towards the certainty of reality. What is certain for man is not what is perceptually experienced, but what comes to life in the soul as duty reveals itself.

[ 10 ] Another image: The boy is nine years old. The neighbor of his father's village comes to the village one Sunday to listen to the priest's sermon. He arrives too late. The sermon is over. The people remember that the nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb keeps the sermons in his soul so that he can reproduce them in full. They fetch him. The boy in the farmer's smock appears. At first he is awkward, but then he delivers the sermon in such a way that one realizes that what lived in this sermon has completely filled his soul; he does not merely reproduce the memorized words; he gives them out of the spirit of the sermon, which lives in him as a complete self-experience. Such an ability to let light up in his own self what came from the world to this self lived in the boy. This is the disposition to experience the spirit of the outside world in one's own self. This is the disposition to find the sustaining power of a world view in the enlightened self. A brightly illuminated developmental current of the personality leads from such boyish experiences to a lecture which the spiritual naturalist Steffens heard from Fichte, who was a professor in Jena at the time, and which he describes. In the course of this lecture, Fichte asks his listeners: "Think of the wall!" The listeners tried to think about the wall. After they have done this for a while, Fichte's next challenge follows: "And now think of the one who thought of the wall!" What a striving for a direct coexistence of one's own soul life with the soul life of the listener! The reference to an inner soul activity to be undertaken directly, which does not merely strive for a word to be communicated to be thought about, but which wants to awaken a living thing slumbering in the souls of the listeners, so that these souls come into a state that changes their previous relationship to the course of the world.

[ 11 ] This approach reflects Fichte's entire way of paving the way to a worldview. Like Descartes, he does not seek the experience of thought that is supposed to bring certainty. He knows that such searching does not lead to finding. In such a search one cannot know whether one has found in a dream or in reality. So do not indulge in a search. But to strengthen oneself in an awakening. Waking up must be similar to what the soul experiences when it wants to penetrate from the field of ordinary into that of true reality. Thinking does not guarantee being for the human ego. But in this I lies the power to awaken itself to being. Every time the soul perceives itself as "I" in the full consciousness of the inner power that becomes alive in the process, a process occurs that presents itself as a self-awakening of the soul. This self-awakening is the basic essence of the soul. And in this self-awakening power lies the certainty of the being of the human soul. May the soul pass through dream states and sleep states: one grasps the power of its self-awakening from every dream and every sleep by making the idea of awakening the image of its basic power. In becoming aware of the self-awakening power, Fichte senses the eternity of the human soul. From this realization flowed words like these: "The world that I had just admired disappears before my eyes and sinks away. In all the fullness of life, order and prosperity that I see in it, it is still only the curtain through which an infinitely more perfect one is concealed from me, and the seed from which it is to develop. My faith steps behind this curtain and warms and enlivens this seed. It sees nothing definite, but expects more than it can grasp here and will ever be able to grasp in time. - Thus I live, and thus I am, and thus I am unchangeable, firm and perfect for all eternity; for this being is not one assumed from without, it is my own, certain true being and essence." (Destiny of man.)

[ 12 ] One will not be tempted to regard such a view in Fichte as proof of a direction of thought hostile to life, turned away from the immediate, powerful life on earth, if one considers his whole way of relating to this life and the life-friendly, life-promoting attitude that permeates all his work and thought. In a letter from 1790, there is a sentence that sheds significant light on this attitude, especially with regard to his idea of immortality: "The surest way to convince yourself of a life after death is to lead your present life in such a way that you may wish for it."

[ 13 ] For Fichte, the power of self-knowledge lies in the self-awakening inner activity of the human soul. And within this activity he also finds the place in the soul where the spirit of the world reveals itself in the spirit of the soul. The will of the world weaves and works through all being for this worldview; and in the volition of its own being, the soul can express this will of the world within itself. The seizing of the duties of life, which are experienced in the soul differently from the perceptions of the senses and thoughts, are the next example of how the will of the world pulsates through the soul. Thus true reality must be grasped; and all other reality, including that of thought, receives its certainty through the light that falls upon it from the reality of the world-will revealing itself in the soul. This will of the world drives man to activity, to action. As a sensual being, man must realize in a sensual way what the will of the world demands of him. But how could the deeds of the will have a real existence if they had to seek this existence in a dream world? No, the world cannot be a dream, because in it the acts of the will must not merely be dreamed, but realized. - By awakening itself in the experience of the will of the world, the ego attains the firm support of the certainty of its being. Fichte speaks about this in his "Determination of Man": "My will should work absolutely through itself, without any tool weakening its expression, in a sphere completely similar to itself, as reason on reason, as the spiritual on the spiritual; - in a sphere, however, to which it does not give the law of life, of activity, of continuity, but which has it in itself; thus to self-acting reason. But self-acting reason is will. The law of the supersensible world would therefore be a will... This sublime will therefore does not go its own way separately from the rest of the rational world. There is a spiritual bond between it and all finite rational beings, and it itself is this spiritual bond of the world of reason... I cover my face before you and put my hand over my mouth. How you are to yourself and appear to yourself I can never understand, just as I can never become yourself. After having lived through a thousand times a thousand spirit worlds, I will understand you just as little as I do now, in this hut of earth. - What I comprehend becomes finite through my mere comprehension; and this can never be transformed into the infinite even through infinite increase and elevation. You are not different from the finite in degree, but in kind. Through this increase they make you only a greater man, and always a greater one; but never the God, the Infinite, who is incapable of any measure."

[ 14 ] Fichte aspired to a worldview that traces all being to the root of the living, and that recognizes its meaning in the living through the coexistence of the human soul with the all-pulsating world will, which creates nature in order to realize a spiritual and moral order in it as in an external body. Such a world view was for him the one that arose from the character of the German people. For him, a worldview that did not "believe in the spirituality and freedom of this spirituality" and that did not "want the eternal development of this spirituality and freedom" was un-German. "What believes in stagnation, decline and circular dance or even puts a dead nature at the helm of world government" is, in his view, not only contrary to a more profoundly urgent insight, but also to the truly German way of being.