Abstract

In this article, I argue that Fichte's notion of the Anstoß cannot refer to anything remotely resembling a physical event in Time and Space. The Anstoß, properly understood, refers to the grammatical role that negation plays in the constitution of a thought.

1. Introduction

Fichte's concept of the Anstoß, the check that we, beings who "posit", encounter in our journey "out into the infinite", has its origins in a language game started by Kant, a game we might call the Freedom Game.¹ Humans, says Kant, are free, free to act, free to think. Kant calls our freedom to think the "spontaneity of thought", and this part of the Freedom Game would be won, if it wasn't for that pesky thing we call reality, or, in Kant's jargon, "experience" (Erfahrung).² Just because I think about a sumptuous feast laid out before me, doesn't make it so. For that, we would require Aladdin's genie. Kant's next move in this game is to say that our (free) thoughts only have objective validity because of sensibility. "Sensibility", one might think, refers to the way that experience, reality, impinges on our organs of perception, causing us to say "There is a feast in front of me" if and only if that is the case. But such an understanding of sensibility would end the Freedom Game, for it would mean that our thoughts are not, in fact, free at all, but rather the final expression of sense data coursing through our mind. To keep the game going, Kant paints an elaborate picture of what sensibility, in fact, is. It is not impacts from the environment, but rather "affection" by the "Thing in Itself". "Causality", Kant tells us, refers to causal impacts in the physical world, whereas "affection" and "sensibility" refer to no such thing.

Jacobi most famously pointed out that this move in the Freedom Game was a cheat: "For the word sensibility is without any meaning when we don't understand it as referring to a distinct real medium between one real thing and another, an actual means from some thing to another" (Jacobi 2025: 109). The monument to freedom that Kant had erected in his Critique of Pure Reason bore the semblance of Kafka's Castle, at the center of everything, and entirely elusive. In Jacobi's words: "...for it drove me perpetually mad that, without this assumption [of the concept of sensibility], I couldn't enter the system, and, with this assumption, I couldn't stay in it" (Jacobi 2025: 109).

If one is to believe modern commentators, this is where Fichte's concept of the Anstoß enters the scene: "Fichte invokes the notion of an Anstoß in order to...give an account of what Kant called the "matter of sensation" (Neuhouser 1990: 48). Thus it seems Fichte is saying something like: we aren't "affected" by the Thing-in-Itself, we are shoved (anstoßen). Lest you think that this seems to just rub salt in the wound, then please consider that Anstoß is a term of art, corresponding to no definition in the German language that has anything to do with pushing, shoving, hitting, clinking, etc: "The matter of sensation is explained here...by the inert, wholly passive Anstoß" (Neuhouser 1990: 48). Other commentators are similarly circumspect: "The 'I' is not limited in its judgings/positings by the mere occurrence (or Anstoss) of some nonconceptual content" (Pippin 2000: 157). Whatever the Anstoß is, we know what it is not, namely, neither active nor conceptual. Another commentator says that the "Anstöße" (this plural usage of Anstoß occurs nowhere in Fichte's oeuvre) are "'checks' or 'stimuli'...experiential data whose status is not posited by us." (Pinkard 2002: 117) Thus, perhaps the Anstoß is, after all, active, insofar as it 'stimulates' us, but it is certainly not posited. None of these commentators make any sense. For Fichte's very point is that there is nothing in experience, nothing at all, unless we posit it. Thus there can be no Anstoß, no "matter of sensation", no "stimuli", no "nonconceptual content" once we, in the words of Wilfried Sellars, "kill..the Myth of the Given" (Sellars 1963: 195) and thereby accept the very Fichtean premise that everything must be posited if it can be said to be at all.

What, then, is Fichte's move in the Freedom Game when he invokes the Anstoß? The answer I am going to propose lies in plain sight, in the very first occurrence of the term in Fichte's 1794 Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre. Fichte first invokes the term not as a term of art, but rather in the everyday sense of objecting to something (Anstoß nehmen), being shocked or offended by something. Fichte says that "common sense" (der gemeine Menschenverstand) might "object" (Anstoß nehmen) to a claim he has put forth (GA I/2: 331). The claim Fichte is referring to is, for our current purposes, entirely irrelevant (but if you have to know, it's the claim that "real opposition and ideal opposition are the same" (GA I/2: 331)). The only point that needs to be made here is that Fichte's very first employment of the term Anstoß draws a line in the sand between, on the one hand, the conceptual meaning of Anstoß in the sense of an objection or offence, and, on the other, the physical meaning of Anstoß in the sense of pushing, shoving, impacting, etc. I am going to argue in this paper that Fichte's position is emphatically on the conceptual side of this distinction.³ When Fichte does cross over into the physical realm when he suggests a "realist" meaning of the Anstoß, he does so only so that he can reject it and effect a paradigm shift away from Kantian sensibility entirely, and into the realm of the purely conceptual. In this new realm, I argue, the Anstoß refers to a logical, or, to speak with Wittgenstein, grammatical feature of thought, namely: negation. Fichte's argument is that thought's apparent freedom is simply thought's ability to think what is not.

2. Eliminating Sensibility

Having opened with the claim that Fichte is referring to something entirely conceptual when he talks of an Anstoß, we must now contend with a complicating fact. Fichte's first deliberate employment of the term as a philosophical term of art conceives of the Anstoß entirely in physical, or as he says "realist" terms. Understanding how and why Fichte employs the term Anstoß here means coming to terms with an unwieldy bestiary of philosophical jargon. The general point is that Fichte employs the term in a last ditch effort to preserve a modicum of naturalism in his account of knowledge. It's the final step in a reductio ad absurdum, which says that try as you might to narrow down the scope of physical determination in an account of knowledge, you will always end up with the absurd claim that thinking is something physical. Fichte calls this absurdity "the error of all realism" which "treats the I purely as a Not-I" and therefore "is unable to explain what is supposed to be explained: the transition from the Not-I to the I" (GA I/2: 355; Fichte 2022: 293).

Fichte presents three versions of "realism" which progressively zero in on the absurdity of confusing things in the physical world with thoughts. The first he calls "dogmatic realism" and equates with Spinoza's materialism. Spinoza's materialism, he says, is the most respectable of all the philosophical positions he considers, save his own.⁴ It avoids the absurdity of mixing thoughts with things by simply denying that there is anything like free thought. Thinking, on this view, is merely a reflection of physical processes. However, such a starting position is unacceptable because it denies the very freedom of thought, Kant's "spontaneity of thought", that Fichte is out to defend.

The second version of realism Fichte calls "quantitative realism" and it is Kant's theory of sensibility. Fichte, at times, has difficulty admitting that this theory is wrong, because, according to Fichte, Kant could do no wrong, and insofar as Kant did botch his theory of knowledge, it was only because Kant "knew very well what he did not say" (GA I/2: 335; Fichte 2022: 273). Nevertheless, we can say that the theory of quantitative realism, Kant's theory of knowledge, is commited to a limited version of physical determination. One has to bite Jacobi's bullet and and address this problem of "affection" if one wants to talk at all about Kant's theory of knowledge. Fichte's way of talking about it is to say that, yes, my thoughts are free, but some of them, a certain "quantity" of them, are wrong. That is the "quantitative" part in "quantitative realism". The realist part of this theory is murky, but it rests on the idea of an external "determination" or "affection" that imposes some limits on my thinking.⁵ Fichte summarizes the position by saying "the quantitative realist asserts the reality, independent of the I, of a mere determination" (Translation my own GA I/2: 334). Fichte tells us that "It should be immediately obvious to everyone that such a realism is the same as what was established above as Critical Idealism, just as it should also be obvious that Kant established nothing else but this..."(GA I/2: 355; Fichte 2022: 293). If Fichte would indulge us by allowing us to state the obvious, the idea is that, in contrast to the Spinozist, who thinks that the mind is just a reflection of physical processes, the Kantian thinks that thoughts are almost entirely thoughts, endowed as such with the freedom characteristic of thought, but they are also "determined" in some way that allows us to distinguish correct thoughts from incorrect ones. This "determination" is "mere determination" because the manifold of sensibility that allows us to confirm the objective validity of our thoughts is, by itself, no thought at all. However, in its cooperation with thinking, this manifold of sensibility provides just enough of a "determination" that allows me to ascertain which of my thoughts are true, and which are not.

Fichte sees, in this second version of realism, what Jacobi sees - that this notion of some external "determination" of thought is incoherent, so long as one is committed to the premise that thinking is free. Fichte is committed to the premise that thinking is free, and so, the next and final move of realism is to say that there is something out there guiding thought in some way towards reality and away from delusion, but we can't really say anything more than that. This move in the language game consists in pointing to some external limitation, something less than an "affection" or "determination" and saying 'About that thing, over there, we can say nothing, other than that it's there'. Fichte's loss for words is apparent, and it is in this moment that he grasps, for the first time, at the technical term Anstoß: "all that needs to be present for the I is — if I may express myself in this way — a check...[Anstoß]" (GA I/2: 355-6; Fichte 2022: 292). For here onward, the circumlocutions for — if we may express ourselves this way — that thing, that event over there, start piling up. The Anstoß is the "impossibility of further extension" (GA I/2: 355; Fichte 2022: 292). In fact, the event that we are describing, about which we can say almost nothing "would not limit the I, qua active". Therefore, to quote one of our recent Fichte commentators mentioned in the introduction, the Anstoß must be "inert, wholly passive" (Neuhouser 48). But that can't be right, because in the same breath in which Fichte claims that this limiting event is not active, he says this: "it would not limit the I, qua active; instead, it would assign it the task of limiting itself." (GA I/2: 355; Fichte 2022: 292). Fichte is allegedly proposing here a "realism that is much more abstract than any of those considered hitherto" (GA I/2: 355; Fichte 2022: 292). But, by invoking the notion of a "task" (Aufgabe), he is failing to keep up the game. Nothing in the physical world, the real world, could possibly 'assign a task' to anybody. An Anstoß that 'assigns a task' is what Fichte would later, in his 1795 Foundation of Natural Right, call a 'summons' (Aufforderung), and only a person, a "rational being" (Vernunftwesen) can do that.⁶ Fichte claims here that he is presenting a realist theory of the Anstoß, but in fact he is already straddling the divide between the physical and the conceptual. Saying something about nothing is a hard act to keep up.

The New Paradigm

Once one eliminates sensibility, there is only spontaneity, properly understood. Having brought realism to silence, Fichte, in the final "synthesis", the final argument of §4.E of the Foundation now needs to voice his true position. This is done easily enough: "no infinity, no limitation; no limitation, no infinity" (GA I/2: 358; Fichte 2022: 296). The Anstoß is the limitation that is constitutive of the I's infinitude. Fichte attempts to clarify what he means by pulling these moments apart, imagining that first one thing happens (infinitude), and then the other (Anstoß): "A check happens to the infinitely outgoing activity of the I, an activity within which, precisely because it extends into the infinite, nothing can be distinguished" (GA I/2: 369; Fichte 2022: 306).

Fichte is doing here what Kant does when we constructs the thought experiment of an "intuitive understanding", a "godly" understanding "that wouldn't represent to itself given objects, but rather through the act of representing would at the same time produce the objects themselves" (B145). "Positing" without negation is precisely such a divine act. Anything I think would, by the power of thought alone, be given in experience. Any claim I could possibility make would, by the power of the claim itself, be true. There is, however, a catch. Such a godly understanding would not be able to employ negation. It would be forbidden from thinking what is not. If it proposed that Aladdin's feast does not exist, then Aladdin's feast wouldn't exist. And in making such a proposal, it would have "represented" the non-existent feast without "producing the object itself".

The thought experiment here has an air of paradox. When we eliminate negation from thought, we arrive at something that doesn't look like thought at all. It looks, instead, like oblivion. For, unable to think what is not, we lose any ability to hold up one object against another and claim that this grape, here, is not the same as that banana, there. The result is that, in the unchecked act of proposing things into existence, we find, as Fichte says, that "nothing can be distinguished." In trying to reach past negation into a realm where everything that is proposed is true, we find nothing at all. The realm of pure Truth, the realm of thinking before the Anstoß is, indeed, as Hegel says a decade later, formless: "The man with sight sees as little in that pure light as in pure darkness, and just as much as the blind man, in the abundant wealth which lies before him." (Hegel 2013: 88) Fichte's aim all along is to argue that thinking is nothing if not held to account by the objections of reality. That is the message he offers in this metaphor:

...light and darkness are not posited in opposition to each other as such, but can be distinguished from each other only in degree. Darkness is merely a very small quantity of light. — This is precisely the relationship between the I and the Not-I. (GA I/2: 302; Fichte 2022: 240)

Fichte pulls apart thinking and being, the I and the Not-I, infinitude and limitation only so that we understand that such a strict division is impossible.

Thinking without negation is a fantasy. It is the fantasy that the freedom to think any thing at all could be anything other than the freedom to think what is not. It was this fantasy that Kant warned about when we said that "The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space." (KrV A5/B8) To think without tethering those thoughts to objects given in empirical reality is to build castles in the air, to send thinking into the senseless realm of "empty space". However, Fichte's (and Hegel's) position is more emphatic. Thinking without resistance is not thinking at all - such thinking cannot even so much as posit a castle in the air. That is because "resistance" in Fichte refers not to the limits of sensibility, not to our limitation to the "field of appearances" but rather to the self-limitation of thinking. The self-limitation of thinking is the experience of being wrong, and it is this experience of resistance that allows the dove to take flight. Fichte describes it this way:

The activity of the I consists in unrestricted self-positing, in opposition to which there occurs some resistance. If the activity of the I were to give way to this ­resistance, then the activity lying beyond the boundary of this resistance would be utterly annihilated and annulled; and, to this extent, the I would posit nothing whatsoever. (GA, etc)

It is not, as Kant took it, that our knowledge is a knowledge of appearances and nothing further. Rather, to think is to push through mere appearance in reaching for the truth. The resistance of thought is that creeping suspicion that maybe I'm mistaken, the realization that I was mistaken, and the cold solace of knowing that maybe now I know how things stand. It can be the despair I feel when my most deeply held assumptions are put to the test, and it can be the relief I feel when I wake up from a fever dream. The resistance that lets thought take flight is reflected in thought's ability to, having considered that things might be one way, determine they are another. Positing, thinking, is the art of "hovering" between "opposing directions", namely between that which is the case and that which isn't. Thinking, Fichte tells us, is "a resisting activity" (eine widerstehende Tätigkeit) (GA I/2: 370).

The 20th century representative of this way of putting things is Wittgenstein: "this paradox (which indeed has the form of a truism) can...be expressed in this way: one can think what is not the case" (Wittgenstein, 2009: §95). Stated in these terms, the correct account of the Anstoß seems rather deflationary: we think true thoughts and false thoughts. This seems just to be stating the obvious:

The agreement, the harmony, between thought and reality consists in this: that if I say falsely that something is red, then all the same, it is red that it isn’t. And in this: that if I want to explain the word “red” to someone, in the sentence “That is not red”, I do so by pointing to something that is red. (Wittgenstein, 2009: §429)

Fichte's Anstoß is the "not" that dwells within each and every claim about what is the case. Even my positive claims, such as "This is red", which appear to have nothing to do with negation, in fact, solely by virtue of being truth claims, have the "not" always on call, ready to jump into action, to refute that "This is red" and assert, instead, that it is not red. Negation is one pole of the compass of truth, always working to orientate me away from my delusional fictions back towards the world as it is. Seen this way, the Anstoß might appear to only limit my thought, to strike down my fantasy and replace it with a slavish sobriety. But that is only half the story. The other half is that I am free to think about things that don't exist. "That is not red," I say, and, in doing so, I bring to mind a world in which that thing could be red. Negation secures a certain distance from just the facts and only the facts, a distance that marks the beginning of what Fichte calls our "infinitude."

Conclusions

Why, if the Anstoß simply refers to negation, did Fichte not simply say as much? Why all the word play, the interminable double entendre that speaks in the language of physics but always means the conceptual? And, finally, why this bloated language of "infinitude"?

In Part III of the Foundation, the Foundation of the Science of the Practical, Fichte engages in a remarkable moment of self-reflection. Fichte argues that, if one wants to understand his philosophy, one must "hover between" the competing claims of idealism and realism. This, he says, can only be accomplished with the imagination. His philosophy, he says, "can be grasped only by the power of imagination" (GA I/2: 415; Fichte 2022: 345). We can formulate Fichte's thought here this way: only that is real which is given in empirical experience. Thoughts, in contrast, are not real at all, but rather ideal. The mystery that Fichte is getting at is the irreality of thought. How is it that these ideal things have anything to say at all about what is real? For it is not simply a matter of correctly employing or not employing the negation sign, though that is certainly part of it. Rather, the true mystery is why, thinking anything, I think anything at all.

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