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 an 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 sense 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 what we are calling 'thinking-as-being' 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. Hence "nothing can be distinguished", for it is only with the help of negation that one can distinguish one thing from another, that one can say that one thing p is not q.

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, in the normal sense of the term, 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 or imagine, in which case it thinks what is not. In Fichte's account, thought arises when 'thinking-as-being', "the activity that goes out into the infinite...encounters a check" ("Auf die ins Unendliche hinausgehende Thätigkeit des Ich...geschieht ein Anstoss"). 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 thinking and being. Of course, thinking 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 in the mind of a judging subject 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 "intuiting understanding" as he describes it in the B-Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Fichte's unchecked "infinite activity", what we are calling 'thinking-as-being' is similar to Kant's notion of a "divine [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). In this thought experiment of Kant's, representation entails being. For example, if a divine understanding "represents" to itself a chair, that chair would be given in intution, which is to say, it would exist in the empirical world. Merely the thought of anything would imply its existence. This is 'thinking-as-being'. It is an imagined identity between thought, or in Kant's terms "representation", on the one hand, and being, existience, givenness in intuition, on the other. Just like his predecessor Kant, Fichte is using an imagined unity of thinking and being to elucidate something unique and remarkable about human thought. In Kant's view, that uniqueness lies in thinking's dependence upon sensible intution ("Thoughts without content are empty" - A51/B75). In Fichte's view, the uniqueness of thought lies in its ability to think what is not, to think incorrectly and/or imaginatively. The "check" marks this entrance of negation to "thinking-as-being", and with it the bifurcation between thinking and being. Being delineates simply what is. Thought can contain what is, but can also contain what is not.

An important antecedent to Fichte's notion of the "check" as negation is the following entry from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations:

429. The agreement, harmony, between thought and reality consists in the fact that, when I say incorrectly that something is red, it is still not red. And when I want to explain to someone the word "red" in the sentence "That is not red", I point to something red.

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.

There are two points here that are relevant for our understanding of Fichte's "check". The first is that negation, the "not" that can occur within any proposition (S is not red) or negating any proposition (Not-(S is red)), coordinates the correspondence between thought and being. Propositions are truth bearers, which means that any proposition that refers to reality is either true or false. Thus it is through correctly applying or not applying "not" to any proposition that a perfect agreement is achieved between thought and being. Thinking and being "harmonize" (to use Wittgenstein's term) through the application or non-application of negation. Negation leads thought to an identity with being. Fichte is expressing this thought from the other direction: from an imagined unity between thought and being, the "check", i.e. negation, marks the separation of thinking from being. Thinking comes into its own as determinations of being that are either truth or false. Thinking is in this way "checked", it encounters the "resistance" of truth, its potential divergence and need to align with what truly is..

The second point of relevance that Wittgenstein's passage brings up is an asymmetry in the relationship that negation has to thinking and being: negation is a characteristic of thought but not of being. Being can only represent what is. Being has no negation. Hence there is no way for being to show the thought "That is not red." Being can make blue or yellow apparent, but not "not red". "Not red" is a characteristic of thought, a disagreement that thought has between a possible predication and what actually is the case. Thus, in order to explain what is meant by "not red", I must point to something red, and then arrive at the meaning of "not red" by expressing my disagreement with what I am pointing at. This second point helps us see why Fichte's "check" is a second stage, a characteristic that gets added to the initial infinite activity. The infinite activity, 'think-as-being' knows no negation. It only covers what is. The entrance of the check marks thinking as unique from being, as in agreement or disagreement with being. Thus we come to our original formulation of thinking as being plus negation.¹