Fichte's "Anstoss" (check, resistance) as Negation

Fichte’s concept of the “Anstoss”, or “check”, that occurs on the “infinite activity” (unendliche Tätigkeit) of the Self, is best understood as negation. The concept of the “check”, as Fichte presents it in his 1794 Foundation of the Entire Science of Knowledge (Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre), outlines a remarkable fact about negation, which is that negation is a feature of judgment, a feature of thought and the propositions that thought brings forth, but not a feature of being. My proposal is that we think of Fichte’s account of the “check” as a account of negation that brings to the fore the uniqueness of thinking as being plus negation.

According to this reading, Fichte begins with an account of mind in which thinking and being are indistinguishable. In such a state, whatever is thought is, automatically, the case. On such an account, there is no space for negation. Indeed, because there is no negation, there is also no language, no thought in any snese that we can recognize, since negation is an essential and distinguishing feature of thought. We can, in analogy to thought, call this original, imagined unity thinking-as-being. In such an imagined thinking-as-being, we have a ’language’ in which there is no negation, so that only positive propositions of the form “S is” or “S is p” are allowed. In such a language, anything ’thought’ will automatically be true. The ’thoughts’ “S is” or “S is p” would automatically imply their truth, or being. Fichte describes such a state as an “activity of the Self that goes out into the infinite, in which…nothing can be distinguished.” This activity “goes out into the infinite” in the sense that it knows no negation, no limits to being. Whatever is thought, is. It is a creative activity par excellence. At the same time, because it lacks the feature of negation, it is devoid of language in any normal sense of the term, hence devoid of judgment, devoid of thought, and thus “nothing can be distinguished.”

This thinking-as-being, the “infinite activity” marks the primacy of being over thought, because it accounts for what is by banishing negation, and along with it, thinking from its realm. Thought, when it does occur, orients itself toward being, and not visa versa. It orients itself toward being because it has negation. Thought thinks what is, but can also err, in which case it thinks what is not. In Fichte’s account, thought arises when thinking-as-being, the “infinite activity” the “encounters a check”. This is the moment at which thought enters the picture. When the “infinite activity of the Self” is “checked”, it realizes that not everything it thinks is, for we, conscious beings, can think what is not. The “check”, the “resistance” to the infinite activity of the Self marks the cleavage between thought and being. Of course, thought and being have a common root: something can only be, can only exist for the Self insofar as the Self thinks it. In this sense, thought, correct thought, at least, does confer being. Insofar as I correctly judge “S is p”, I bring “S is p” into view. The “S” that is “p” comes to exist for me. This common root of thinking and being is the “infinite activity” of the Self. When everything I judge is true, then thought does indeed entail being. However, I can judge falsely, and in this sense, my ability to determine being encounters a “check”, a “resistance” (Widerstand), as Fichte also calls it. This is the resistance of objectivity. Our thoughts must follow being. With negation comes rational beings who use language. The entire complex of thinking and judgment emerges from this original “check” on “thinking as being”. Thus Fichte, from this point forward, in his “Deduction of Representation”, can deduce all of the features of consciousness.

To summarize: Fichte’s notion of the Self’s infinite activity and the check, or resistance, to which this activity is subjected marks the unity of, and difference between, thinking and being. We can further illuminate this thought by connecting it with familiar precedents and antecdents. The precendent I have in mind is Kant’s “intellectual intuition.” The antecedent is the following entry from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:

429. Die Übereinstimmung, Harmonie, von Gedanke und Wirklichkeit liegt darin, daß, wenn ich fälschlich sage, etwas sei rot, es doch immerhin nicht rot ist. Und wenn ich jemandem das Wort »rot« im Satze »Das ist nicht rot« erklären will, ich dazu auf etwas Rotes zeige.