Fichtes Theory of Individuality :: Philosophy

Fichtes Theory of Individuality THEME Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre lends it ego as app arently no another(prenominal) philosophy of mind to the extraction or extrapolation of a theory of individuality. Moreover it proves possible to marry the key concepts on which my essay concentrates to current neurophysiological thinking on how memories are laid down and retrieved. Accordingly it is those nuptials that this essay attempts to perform. PART I The world in my mind The student of Descartes might be brought up short circuit by Fichtes revision of the cogito statement I am I. Soon it becomes apparent that this I does not think The primordial, absolutely unconditioned first-class honours degree principle of human knowledge . . . is an act (Tathandlung) which does not and cannot appear among the empirical states of our consciousness, but rather lies at its basis and alone makes it possible. I,91 Thus begins his effort to realize Kants system for although the old man growled God preserve us from friends like these, it cannot be denied that the Critiques *presuppose* a fully-formed mind and may therefore be said to have turned a blind eye to some mandatory prior midwifery. Fichtes solution conceives of the Ich as essentially an act as an amorphous consciousness brimful with psychic energy seeking instantiation as a finite thinking being. Unlike the cartesian self, the fichtean Ich is initially a self in abstracto I, 96 & 97, the principle of activity in all purity and lacking all predicates I, 110. Accordingly what the Ich can experience in this state is cryptograph remotely akin to the cogito, but rather a freudian oceanic feeling of limitless being. From this emerges the desire to posit itself, which can mean nothing other than a striving for restlessness. Thus, The pure self-reverting activity of the Self is a striving . . . This boundless striving, carried to infinity, is the condition of the possibility of any object whatsoever no striving, no object. I, 262 . Echoes of Goethes apophthegm, Im Anfang war die Tat, itself a sovereign minds correction of the evangelical In the beginning was the word. Agency precedes the self-consciousness which commands words. But an Ich, wanting to become a Self, needs correlation to an Other. Activity, whether mental or physical, necessarily implies the existence of a correlated extraneous reality in relation to which we think and act and which comprises the theatre where these relational activities are enacted.