Tilly: Fichte's principles and knowledge of the scientific methods and purposes

The basic insight that Fichte regarded as the main thrust of critical philosophy was the concept of freedom. He argues that the will or self is not one thing, not a link in a pure chain of cause and effect, but a free, self-determined activity. Only such activity is truly real, and everything else is a dead, passive experience: it is life and mind, knowledge and action, and in fact, the principle of our whole world of experience, the driving force of all civilizations and processes. It is the basis on which our knowledge depends, the unifying principle of theoretical intellectuality, which Kant once hinted at and Reinhold sought, and which it is the common foundation of theoretical and practical reason. The study of knowledge, therefore, proved to be the most important subject of philosophical inquiry and a matter that Fichte had always faced throughout his arduous career. Epistemology is the key to all knowledge: he provides a comprehensive and exhaustive exposition of the conditions, principles, and premises of theoretical and practical rationality in epistemology.

In Fichte's view, Kant abstracted categories from experience, but did not prove that they were necessary laws of reason: he did not prove his principles. Fichte tells us that this can only be derived from a common ground, only through a rigorous scientific process. For every science to be a science, it must have a coherent system of propositions unified by first principles; it must be an interrelated system of propositions, an organic whole in which each proposition occupies a definite position and has a definite relationship with the whole. Thus, the concept of space is central to geometry, and the concept of causation is central to the natural sciences. Different sciences need an all-encompassing science, a science about science, a theory of knowledge that will establish or prove the fundamental principles on which every science is based. This universal science or philosophy—the source of certainty in all other sciences—must itself proceed from a self-evident or necessary proposition, from an absolute first principle which will give its judgments scientific character and at the same time make them valid in all other fields of study.

Yet this central science is not the legislator, but the compiler of the historical sources of knowledge: it is aware of the system of the necessary activity of the mind, monitoring or observing the mind in the process of creation. But it is not merely a mere registration of what happens, although Fichte sometimes makes such a statement about it; it strives to understand the inevitability of these activities, in an attempt to reveal the basis or logical premise of different forms of cognition. "If even one link in the long chain that idealism seeks to create cannot be connected to the adjacent link, our science has no right to declare that it proves anything." The assumption is that the mind itself is a rational system, that it operates as organic reason, that the different functions of reason are not broken meaningless acts, but that they all contribute to a common end; without these functions of reason, the purposes of reason—that is, the evolution of self-consciousness—cannot be realized. Therefore, the philosopher should understand the purpose or meaning of all consciousness before engaging in deductive activity. Just like in a clock, if we know the purpose of the whole, its structure, its shape, etc., we can say what its parts must be, so that in the case of the system of consciousness we can understand the parts of it, if we understand the purposeful whole—a clear, complete, and developed self-consciousness. The epistemological approach is to prove that the different activities of the intellect contribute to the evolution of self-consciousness, without which the mind cannot become free and self-conscious. In his earlier, more technical works, Fichte developed a system of knowledge from the basic principles; in the more popular works, he proceeded from the observation of knowledge to the principles; but his goal was always the same—the elucidation of the organic unity of knowledge. He sometimes calls his methods the methods of genesis; however, it does not aim to describe the psychological origins of the principles of knowledge, but to prove how they arise from necessary presuppositions, or how reason itself evolved them.

In order to study the origin of rational thought, the philosopher must make the mind come into motion through an act of will: therefore, philosophy begins not with facts, but with activity. Knowledge is not an idea of the world or a mere passive reflection, but a self-determined living process—not property, but performance. True knowledge is possible only through a free act. We can understand only when we are able to create freely in our hearts; what we cannot create, we cannot understand. Consciousness cannot be explained by anything outside itself; it cannot be produced by something external to itself, it is a spontaneous act, or a creation that is aware of itself in creative activity. In other words, knowledge necessarily presupposes a purely, self-determined activity as its basis, or knowledge is such an activity. Knowledge, reason, thought, are free. Without this activity, there is no sense of the world, experience, or thought; therefore, this activity of thought is the basic principle we have been looking for. The rationality of the pure self, the principle of self-nature, or self-activity is the starting point of epistemology, the self-evident premise of all knowledge; it is also the end or purpose of our science, because when the theory of knowledge reaches the full self-consciousness, consciousness grasps the meaning of all knowledge.

We have seen that there needs to be an act of will to bring the mind or self into motion, but once it begins to run, it proceeds in some inevitable way. In this sense, necessity is a product of freedom. I am not forced to think, but once I think, I must think according to the law—according to the form of space-time, according to the principle of sufficient reason, etc. But without the active self, all consciousness cannot be. Take, for example, the judgment of a= a; although simple, it is impossible without a mind with integrated powers. If the ego does not jump into existence and action, or, in Fichte's words, if the ego does not set itself, there is no subject, no object, and no empirical world. Since there is no world of experience and no world of phenomena without the self as a condition, it is therefore impossible to conceive the self as a link in the chain of objects; The ego is the basis or condition of the whole sequence of natural events and, therefore, cannot be included in such events.