The German Genius

we make between subject and object is itself subjectively established. 48 Fichte accepted Jacobi’s idea of immediate certainty, Reinhold’s immediate certainty of consciousness, and Kant’s subjective universality, but added what was for him the most important element, the immediate certainty of self -consciousness. Self-consciousness, he insisted, is a basic ingredient of consciousness and together they are the irreducible elements by which we grasp reality. Moreover, a basic ingredient of self-consciousness and consciousness is the “not-self.” “The self is not a static entity—it develops through time as its awareness of itself grows and changes, through encounters with the ‘not-self’” (i.e., other selves and objects “out there”). Reason is in effect a by-product of consciousness and self-consciousness—we infer the world around us, its interconnections and dependencies. 49
    Now at one level, to us in the twenty-first century, these arguments of Fichte’s seem like a very confused and overelaborate way of stating the obvious, even repeating much of what Locke had said far earlier, and that is the way some people have construed him, with many others viewing Hegel as by far the more important post-Kantian. But, thinking our way back into late eighteenth-century forms of understanding the world, Fichte’s theories, as set out in his lectures and books, were significant in two ways that are not immediately obvious to us. First, his was the ultimate “psychologizing” of human nature (to return to the anachronistic term). His emphasis on the self, the “I,” and the “not-self,” without any reference to religion in general or Christianity in particular, was an important stage in the revision of our understanding, from the theological to the psychological, which would lead in time to the Freudian and post-Freudian world. At the same time, his understanding of the centrality of the self, and its understanding of—and interactions with—the “not-self,” had important implications for ideas about freedom. In Germany, and in Kantianism in particular, as was mentioned above, freedom had been seen as an “inner” phenomenon, a psychological freedom to be achieved by learning, by education, by a journey inward. Fichte realized that (a quite different idea of) freedom depended on the relation between the self and the “not-self,” that the self could be free only to the extent that its freedom did not impinge on, or curtail, the freedom of other selves. In a land of small absolute states, this was far more controversial—revolutionary even—than it seems to us now.
    Likewise, Fichte’s theories threw a fresh light on the state and its responsibilities. “The state functions as the ‘objective’ viewpoint that precipitates out of the various subjective viewpoints of the citizenry as they each keep score on each other.” 50 This begins to sound like Jeremy Bentham’s “felicific calculus,” with the state’s virtue judged by the contentedness of the greatest number. Insofar as one self is the equal of another, this also took on the color of a democratic, even republican, viewpoint.
    Fichte was a charismatic teacher whose lectures often overflowed, with students standing on ladders at the windows to hear him. But his career at Jena came to a sudden end when he reacted to criticism in a high-handed way and his threatened resignation was accepted. 51 He transferred to Berlin where he taught privately for a while, before being chosen as the first philosophy professor at the newly formed University of Berlin in 1810 (see Chapter 10).
    It is worth pointing out that the Wissenschaftslehre went through sixteen different editions. 52 This had something to do with his charisma but also owed something to the fact that a new form of understanding of man was being born. That new understanding was a psychological approach to mankind. Locke and Francke played their part in this new understanding, and Pietism, too. But Kant had introduced one other change that should not go unnoticed. Though Idealism is sometimes referred to as a form of speculative philosophy, that isn’t wholly fair. Kant had introduced a rigorous new way of observing, of observing ourselves . This sometimes got out of hand—it may well have got out of hand with Fichte—but this observation of ourselves, the concentration on subjective universality, consciousness and self-consciousness, was the real beginning of modern