Fichtes Theory of Individuality :: Philosophy

Fichtes Theory of identity element THEME Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre lends itself as app arntly no other philosophical corpse of mind to the extraction or extrapolation of a theory of individuality. Moreover it proves contingent to marry the key concepts on which my analyse concentrates to current neurophysiological idea 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 cogency be brought up short by Fichtes revision of the cogito rumor I am I. Soon it becomes apparent that this I does non think The primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of human acquaintance . . . is an act (Tathandlung) which does not and great dealnot 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 complete Kants system for although the old man growled God preserve us from friend s like these, it cannot be denied that the Critiques *presuppose* a fully-formed mind and may therefore be state to have turned a blind eye to some needed prior midwifery. Fichtes solution conceives of the Ich as essenti altogethery 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 application in all purity and lacking all predicates I, 110. Accordingly what the Ich can experience in this state is nothing 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 self-consciousness. 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(prenominal) object whatsoever no striving, no objec t. I, 262. Echoes of Goethes apophthegm, Im Anfang war occur 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, missing to become a Self, needs correlation to an Other. Activity, whether mental or physical, necessarily implies the existence of a correlated external humanity in relation to which we think and act and which comprises the theatre where these relational activities are enacted.