Fichte's Theoretical Project

The purpose of this blog post is to describe in broad strokes Fichte’s aims in the theoretical philosophy he put forth in his 1794 Foundation of the entire Science of Knowledge (hereafter: Foundation).¹ I’m going to argue that Fichte’s salient point concerns the way in which negation structures human experience as something we can call imaginative openness. According to Fichte, every judgment that we have is also, by virtue of being a judgment, connected to an opposing, or negating judgment. Fichte wants to show that the way in which judgment hangs together with its negation explains two seemingly contradictory features of human judgment, namely the objective force of judgment, which is to say, that way in which a judgment makes a claim to being correct, to determining what is the case, as well as this judgment’s inherent fallability. I take it that my car is parked outside, but I may, in fact, despite whatever degree of certainty I may have, be in error. The only way in which these two features of judgment can coexist, according to Fichte, is through the activity of the imagination, which allows for a judgment to carry its own negation with it. The Theoretical Part of the 1794 Foundation unfolds this line of thought gradually but deliberately. It begins with the apparent firmless of our empirical, or we could be generally say: objective judgments, seeks to demonstrate their fallability, and from this, unfolds a surprising claim about the centrality of imagination to all objective judgment and thus also, even more surprisingly, about our search for the infinite (das Unendliche) within the realm of objective experience. The exhilarating feature of this line of thought is that it takes a seemingly dry, or inconspicuous feature of human thought, namely negation, and shows how negation contains within its structure the dynamic of imaginative openness. That is to say that once we understand how objective judgments and their negation hang together, we can understand the force with which imagination undergirds human experience.

The Idealist Project: Thought as a Nexus

Before we get into the details of Fichte’s thought, it is helpful to understand broadly the larger argumentative current, the larger philosophical dialectic, that Fichte is moving in. This is because, in his account of negation, Fichte is continuing, or intensifying, an argumentative move originally made by Kant. The Kantian project, as Fichte understands it, is to show how human thought hangs together, how the thought we have in one moment is connected to thoughts we have in other moments, and how these thoughts, in general, hang together.

This project of showing how thoughts hang together is anything but banal. It seeks to refute, in an eye-opening way, the challenge of Hume’s empiricism, which is to say Hume’s account of human mental life as mere affectation. According to (the Kantian understanding of) Hume’s empiricism, thoughts do not hang together in any essential way, but rather only accidentally, if at all. Our pysche is bombarded by stimulation from the outside, which produces our mental life, so that the only connection that one thought might have to the next is that both thoughts are produced by the nexus of efficient causation that controls every aspect of our mental lives and experience of the world.

Kants replies to this by claiming that thoughts are not merely the result of external stimuli acting on our psyche, but rather complex entities that have a unique origin in our consciousness and hang together in certain ways, ramifying and connecting to other thoughts we have. One way, for example, that thoughts hang together, according to Kant, is by virtue of the unity of apperception, which is to say that any thought I have, is connected to any other thought I have insofar as, I, the thinking subject, am thinking them. ² In other words, the “I think” connects all my thoughts together. The unity of apperception is not the only way in which thoughts hang together. In fact, the entire baroque palace that Kant builds in the Critique of Pure Reason is an account of everything that Kant believes must hang together in the act of thinking.³ Thus, for example, any empirical perception, i.e. intuition, of an object in time and space, places that object in the same spatial and temporal continuum of every other intution, so that all perceptions in time and space are connected in terms of belonging to the same continuum of time and space. One could go on and on here, describing the features of Kant’s system one after another as a feature that shows us how mental life is a nexus, with various mental phenomenon connected to and influencing other mental phenomenon. This would include, for example, the importance of categories, which is to say that any empirical perpection must be unifyied under a certain concept, in order for it to be a perception at all. It would also include the rules of logic, which dictate how multiple judgments hang together in syllogistic fashion. And it would include how individual judgments come together to form the entirety of our human experience, and how this entirety of experience, which, seen as a whole, makes visible our greatest aspirations and questions in life, hangs together according to the regulative ideals of reason. And so on and so forth.

For our purposes it is enough to say that in his 1794 theoretical philosophy, Fichte is adding something new to this picture of human mental life as a nexus. He is adding a new connective principle. This new principle is the connective work of negation and the mental power of imagination that undergirds, makes possibles, reveals itself in, the act of negation. This is not to say that Fichte doesn’t have other innovative ideas about human thought as a nexus. As has been illuminated elsewhere, Fichte, in his reception of Kant, is perhaps most impressed by the Kant’s notion of the unity of apperception, and some of the most influential research on Fichte’s philosophy has focused on how his philosophy is an intensification of the concept of the unity of apperception, moving from Kant’s “I think” to “The I posits…”.⁴ I want to highlight, however, the centrality of negation specifically in Fichte’s theoretical philosophy, for I believe that it is an entirely new and radical idea in the context of the Kantian dialectic in which Fichte is moving. It is also the central idea of the Theoretical Part of the 1794 Foundation, a difficult text that is in need of clarification.

From unconnected to connected negation

We can best understand Fichte’s 1794 theoretical philosophy as making a move analogous to Kant’s move from the Humian view of thoughts as unconnected to his own view of thoughts as essentially connected via certain transcendental principles. Fichte beings his argument by entertaining the philosophical view that the negation of a thought is unconnected to the previous thought that it negates, and he gradually moves to a view in which the negation of a thought is not only connected to the previous thought, but in fact already present as an important mental force within the non-negated positive thought. This is a three phase movement, that consists of the following:

1. Fichte considers the view in which the negation of a thought is a new thought, unrelated to the previous thought that was negated.

2. Fichte rejects that view in favour of a new view in which a thought and its subsequent negation hang together in a special way. The negation of a thought is, namely, the realization of a potential that existed within the positive thought, namely the possibility that it was incorrect.

3. Fichte revises this previous view to more emphatically state the essential connection between a thought and its negation. In this view, not only is negation a possibility within every thought, but this negation as possiblity has a mental force, i.e. it shapes human experience, even when it exists as mere possibility, structuring human experience as open to new experience and longing for the ultimate experience.

These three stages of Fichte’s argument Fichte marks as follows:

• Fichtes describes stage (1) as a qualitative position. Because of the details of how Fichte sets up his investigation as a contest between Idealism and Realism, the ‘qualitative’ position considers two competing theories of negation, ‘qualitative idealism’ and ‘qualitative realism’.
• Fichte describes stage (2) as a quantitative position. Just like the first ‘qualitative’ stage, the ‘quantitve’ position splits in two between quantitative realism and quantitvate idealism.
• Stage (3) doesn’t have a specific label, but it is simply the final view of negation that Fichte arrives at. It is the view that Fichte’s puts forth as the result of his investigation, as his final considered view on negation. It is at this point that the account of imagination takes central stage. Fichte plainly states his view here concerning the unity of a thought with its negation, and outlines the consequences of such a view, describing our imagination as a power to ‘hover’ between opposites, and structure human experience writ large as a mediation between ’the finite’ and ’the infinite’.

Negation as exchange, or: getting into the thorniness of Fichte’s formulations

Our goal now is to get into the thick of Fichte’s text, so that we can see Fichte’s three stage argument at work. This is a dangerous undertaking. Up until now, we have described Fichte’s philosophical argument while staying very far away from his specific formulations. The reason for this is that, sadly, Fichte’s 1794 Foundation text is almost unreadable. It is horribly abstract and seemingly technical, but according to a toolbox of rules and techniques that appear to be Fichte’s alone. Interpreting this text requires willfully bending the letter of the Fichte’s argument to fit our own. Of course this should ring alarm bells that we are not, in fact being faithful to Fichte’s text. However, this method legitimates itself when our willful interpretations of certain passages allow us to understand other parts of the text that were otherwise unaccessible and lead us finally to a more holistic understanding of Fichte’s text than we would otherwise have. In other words, should my interpretation seem too willful, then I ask to be redeemed by the ability of such an interpretation to contribute to an overall roadmap of a very difficult text.

Before we get into Fichte’s three-stage argument regarding the unity of negation, we need to see how Fichte generally defines negation in the Foundation of Theoretical Knowledge. Negation in this text refers to the ‘Not-I’ determining or limiting the ‘I’. This is more or less Fichte’s definition of theoretical knowledge. We can get a grip on what Fichte is talking about here by describing what Fichte is saying in terms of empirical, objective, judgments. ‘Empirical’, because it is about something right before our eyes, and ‘objectives’ because it is a judgment about our objective reality. In an empirical judgment, we make a judgment that something is the case, for example “This is a red cube.” Now, in so far as this is a judgment that we make, it is not empirical reality that is making the judgment, but rather us. However, empirical reality is limiting that judgment is so far as our judgment is answerable to empirical reality. The truth of our judgment lies not in us as those who judge, but rather the empirical state of affairs to which we refer in judging. The moment in judging at which this answerability to reality is most clear, and which Fichte, in the later stages of his argument uses as an example, is the moment in which we correct our judgment as false, i.e. in which we say “I judged that to be a red cube, but now I see that it is, in fact, a red pyramid.”⁵ We thus negate the judgment “This is a red cube”, revising it with the judgment “This is not a red cube, [but rather a red pyramid].” Fichte describes this moment in which we negate a previous judgment as the “exchange of activity and passivity” (Wechsel-Tun und Leiden). Our judgments can be understood here as moments of our ‘activity’, and in the moment that empirical reality weighs in on our judgments, showing one to be false, this ‘activity’ turns to ‘passivity’, as a ‘suffering’, since we are relinquishing that judgment, and empirical, or objective, reality is asserting its ‘activity’ over and against us, by correcting our judgment, by showing that we cannot determine reality through our judgments alone, but rather only through our correct judgments.

Negation, for Fichte, in the Foundation of Theoretical Knowledge refers to this complex moment of reliquishing an objective judgment. This moment of moving from the judgment “This is a red cube” to “This is not a red cube” captures that complicated dance of between, on the one hand, the activity of our judgments, and, on the other, their answerability to the states of affair they judge. It is in this moment that we can see how the “Not-I”, or objective (empirical) reality, negates the judging activity of the “I.” And yet the “I”, thoughout this process of judging and then negating its judgments, remains active as the one who judges.

In some sense, this act of negation is present in all our objective judgments, because even if we stand by a certain objective judgment, it still remains answerable to reality, so that we are ready to relinquish it should it prove to be incorrect. Thus we can say that both the assertion of judgments as our judgments, and the possibility that we must relinquish these judgments, i.e. their negatability, are two moments that are present in every moment of objective judgment, and thus in theoretical knowledge in general. Bringing out the tension between these two moments is the project of the Foundation of Theoretical Knowledge and is contained within Fichte’s grounding principle of theoretical knowledge. Fichte formulates the principle as follows: “The I posits itself as determined by the Not-I”.⁶ The entire Foundation of Theoretical Knowledge is the unfurling of this principle, which, for Fichte, means teasing out its inner contradictions and then arriving at an account of theoretical knowledge that explains, or resolves these inner contradictions. From what we have thus far described, the central contradiction that Fichte is concerned with is how the “I” can both “posit” reality, which we can take here to mean judging, and thereby determining, reality, and yet limit this positing to the objective state of affairs, which is to say, see its own judgments as “determined by the Not-I.” The moment in which this contradiction comes to a head is the moment in which we relinquish, or negate, a previous judgment, because we take the previous judgment to be in error. This is the moment, we will recall, that Fichte describes as “an exchange of activity and passivity” between the “I” and the “Not-I”. In this moment, the “activity” of the “I”, its judgment, ceases to be, because objective reality, the ultimate and only source of truth of the Self’s objective judgments, asserts its determining “activity”.

Qualitative, i.e. Dogmatic Negation

Having sampled Fichte’s formulation of the problem of negation, we can now observe how he sets up the first stage of his argument, which we have described as ‘qualitative negation’. According to the qualitative view, there is no essential way in which a judgment and its negation are connected to one another. Both the initial judgment “This is a red square” and it’s negation “This is not a red square” are seen as separate, unconnected judgments. There might be a way in which they hang together logically, but Fichte is only concerned with those connections between thoughts that exist by virtue of how human’s necessarily think. These connections are more clearly subject-dependent than logic, which could be seen as purely objective, and more entrenched in the nature of human thought, more essential to human thought, than psychological phenomenon. We can call them ’transcendental connections’ in a nod to Kant’s definition of transcendental philsophical.

If one has accepted that there is no transcendental connection between a thought and its negation, then the only question that remains is how objective judgments, in general, occur. The question cannot be about the interconnectness of a judgment and its negation, since, on this view, there is no connection, but rather only about judgments as atomic phenomena. Fichte answers this question by saying that there are two possibilities for explaining objective judgments, neither of them satisfactory, namely ‘dogmatic idealism’ and ‘dogmatic realism’. In both cases, the explanation of objective judgments must explain how it is that a judgment which originates in the “I”, in the judging subject, the “Self”, is necessarily a judgment about objective reality, and not, say, a feverish dream. Dogmatic idealism answers this challenge by saying that empirical judgments are different from say, mere hallucinations, because the judging subject takes these judgments to have objective reality. The judging subject gives these judgments a weight that makes them be about objective reality, and not, say, a fantasy. In Fichte’s language: “all reality of the Not-I is merely a reality from the I that has been transfered.”⁷ In other words, in making objective judgments, the subject takes these judgments to have objective weight. Fichte’s example of such a dogmatic idealism is Leibniz’s notion of a pre-established harmony, where every subject is a monad, seeing the world through representations that originate in the subject. For the subject, these representations have objective weight simple because they do. In Fichte’s language, their reality “has been transfered from the I”. From an external, theory-building perspective of philosophy, these representations are correct because of reasons that we can’t explain, or as Fichte says “the representations develop from the I in a manner that is entirely unknown and unavailable to us…for example in a resolute pre-established harmony.”⁸

It is essential to the dogmatic position that there is no extended account of how objective judgments have both a subjective origin, i.e. an origin within a judging subject, and an objective validity. Objective judgments simply occur as such, and obtain their objectivity by, as per their definition, being about, or referring to objective reality. In Fichte’s langauge, the way in which these ‘representations’ come about ‘is entirely unknown and unavaialable to us.’ Likewise, dogmatic realism is also unable to describe the way in which objective judgments as thoughts necessary act and hang together as acts of the thinking subject. In contrast, however, to dogmatic idealism, which explains the origin of objective judgments as hidden within the recesses of the subject, dogmatic realism locates the origin of objective judgments as being outside of the subject, and therefore also unaccessible to the subject. In dogmatic realism, objective judgment, just like all other mental phenomena, are determined by an external reality. In this view, the subject is a causally determined being though and though, possessing no internal connections of thought whatsoever. Every thought that might occur has its origin from outside the subject, in objective reality. In Fichte’s language: “there cannot be a transference [of reality from the I to the Not-I], without already assuming the independent reality of the Not-I, a thing-in-itself.” ⁹ Here, the “reality” that is transfered to the Not-I, in this case the objective judgment that ascertains the reality of something in the objective world, is explained by the ability of that reality, that Not-I, to determine the judging capacity of the subject, and indeed all aspects of the subject. In other words, the world simply floods in when we open our eyes, determining our mind through and through, causing us to see what we see. These objective judgments are by definition correct insofar as they merely reflect our causal determination, so that even if we err in seeing a red cube, for example, our erring is simply the necessary result of the way in which the light hitting out eyes waterfalls into the mental event of seeing a red cube. As Fichte describes dogmatic realism in one passage: “the Not-I is the cause of representation, [and] it [i.e. representation] its effect”, or “the I is…a being with representations that must follow the state of things in themselves.”¹⁰

Quantitative Negation as the Correctability of judgment

Fichte moves from the qualitative views of judgment to the quantitative views by recognizing that negation plays a crucial rule in structuring and validating objective judgment. His crucial insight is that there are not simply judgments as such, some of them affirmative (“This is a red cube”), some negative (“This is not a red cube”), but rather that affirmative and negative judgments hang together in a special way that characterizes all objective judgment. In Fichte’s words:

We are denying the possibility that Being in itself can be separate from Being in exchange. Both [elements of the exchange] are posited as exchanging, and, outside of this exchange, are not posited at all.

Die Möglichkeit, ein Sein an sich von einem Sein im Wechsel abzusondern, wird geläugnet: beide sind gesetzt als Wechselglieder, und sind ausser dem Wechsel gar nicht gesetzt.(Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, 101).

Once we understand “exchange” (Wechsel) as the moment of negation in judgment, then we can understand what Fichte is saying here. The core argument here is that there is no objective judgment that holds absolutely, which is simply to say that every objective judgment is negatable by virtue of being answerable to the actual, i.e. objective, state of affairs. Any objective judgment I could make can be refuted if, upon further inspection, it turns out not to be true. This is what Fichte means what he says that the elements of the exchange, the positive judgment and its negation, are “not posited at all” aside from their “exchange.” There is no empirical judgment that holds absolutely, what Fichte calls “Being in itself”. This is in constrast to other things that do hold absolutely, like, in Fichte’s system the ‘self-positing’ of the self, or Kant’s ‘I think’ that must accompany all thoughts. ¹¹ The negatability, or refutability, of objective judgments puts an affirmative judgment and its negation into a special relationship. In making the affirmative judgment, I also think the negation of that judgment, without actually judging so, but with the knowledge that it hangs together with the affirmative judgment I make. The negative judgment is not simply yet another judgment among others that I could make, but arises as a possibility that is essentially tied to the affirmative judgment.

Even more emphatically, we can say that the negative judgment that is thought with the affirmative judgment is what guarantees the objectivity of the affirmative judgment. Without the negative judgment as a possibility that accompanies the affirmative judgment, the affirmative judgment would stand unconditionally. But for objective judgments this cannot be the case. Every judgment is only valid in so far as it correctly describes the state of affairs in the world. In making an objective judgment ’this is a red square’, I am affirming it only to the extent that it correctly describes the state of affairs, so that it’s negation ’this is not a red square’ stands always ready in the wings should a revision be necessary. There is no judgment ’this is a red square’ without the thought of its potential negation. In Fichte’s language, the judgment and its negation are not each posited “immediately”, but rather posited together as opposites, or “mediately”(s. 103): “A is the same as Not B, and absolutely nothing further; and B is the same as Not A and absolutely nothing further”. The affirmative judgment, here ‘A’, and it’s negation, here ‘B’, necessarily hang together, where A excludes B, and B excludes A, and there is no affirmation without the knowledge that this excludes its negation. “A is the same as Not B”, in our interpretation an affirmative judgment says that “A” excludes the negative judgment “B”, and cannot be thought without also bringing with it this fact of its excluded negation. One cannot make the judgment “this is a red square”, without also being implicitly aware of the thought “this is not a red square”, and also being implicitly aware that this negation both accompanies the positive judgment as a possibility and is excluded by the affirmative judgment. When Fichte says “A” is “absolutely nothing further” than “Not B”, what he means is that there is no way that A can be affirmed without implicating the negative judgment “B”. To say that “A” is “absolutely nothing further” than “Not B”, is to say that, in every moment of judging A, the negation ‘B’ is also implicated as excluded. Nor, the other way around, is there negation, without the knowledge that this excludes its affirmation.

Armed with this insight that all objective judgment is ‘mediate’, which is to say that objective judgments always stake correctable positions, Fichte is prepared to articulate new versions of idealism and realism. He calls these positions “quantitative” in comparison to the “qualitative” positions of dogmatic idealism and dogmatic realism. In Fichte’s lexicon, ‘quantitative’ means that something is true to a certain extent, and not true to the remaining extent.¹² As this applies to judgment, this means that a certain quantity of objective judgments are correct, and the remaining quantity are incorrect. Such a view, namely that only a certain quantity of our objective judgments are correct, is not available in the dogmatic positions. In the dogmatic positions, a judgment holds absolutely, independently of its negation, and it is a surprise, an unrelated event, when that judgment turns out to be false. In his description of qualitative idealism, Fichte describes it like so: “In the past [qualitative idealism] an activity, posited in itself, was negated by the nature and essense of the Self. It, the activity that is in itself definitely possible, is negated absolutely and without any further reason.” The “activity that is in itself definitely possible” refers to the activity of making a judgment that excludes negation, that stands “in itself”. In the quantitative version of idealism, such an activity, an activity of absolute, irrefutable judgment, was thought to be possible. And yet, objective judgments are answerable to the objective state of affairs, so the question is how such an absolute judgment can even fall, and when it does fall, it happens “without any further reason”. In contrast, quantitative idealism dispenses with the idea of an absolute objective judgment. Objective judgment is, and can only be, judgment that carries its potential negation with itself, a thought that Fichte captures with his notion of “mediate activity”: “Accordingly [i.e. in accordance with the new, quantitative idealism] no activity at all is negated in the self: the mediate activity is present, and there ought not to be any immediate activity at all.” This means that when an objective judgment is negated, it is seen as the realization of a possibility that was already present in the incorrect judgment. This is because the affirmative judgment and its negation hang together and mutually implicate one another, ready to trade places as the objective state of affairs dictates.

While the quantitative version of idealism revises the ‘dogmatic’ misconception that an objective judgment is made to stand absolutely, the quantitative version of realism revises the ‘dogmatic’ misconception of realism that the judging subject has immediate access to the objective state of affairs insofar as it is causally determined by world. In the quantitative version of realism, objective judgments are the result of the subject’s spontaneity, but there is some external force that corrects the false judgments, even while it doesn’t interfere with the correct judgments. This means that the objective world as percieved by the subject is no longer the direct result of the subject’s being so determiend to perceive, but rather the objective world is, as in the idealist picture, constructed by the spontaneity of the judging subject. However, in Fichte’s view, this picture remains realist because the objective world still, in some way, weighs in on this subjective construct, by negating incorrect judgments. Objectivity is that which negates. In Fichte’s words:

The qualitative realist asserts the reality of something that determines, a reality that exists indendently from the self; the quantitative [realist] asserts the reality, independent of the Self, of a mere determination.

Der qualitative Realist behauptet die vom Ich unabhängige Realität eines bestimmenden; der quantitative, die vom Ich unabhängige Realität einer blossen Bestimmung. (_Foundation, 106).

In the dogmatic view of realism, the worlds exists as we see it, i.e. it has a ‘reality that exist indenpendently from the Self’, and it determines us, through efficient cause, to see the world as a we do. In contrast, the quantitative view of realism can say nothing of the world in itself, i.e. outside of how we construct through objective judgment, but it does claim that there is a force beyond our judgment that determines our judgment. The objective world exists “merely as being opposed” to us (“das Wesen der Wichselglieder…[besteht] in dem blossen Entgegensein.”), which is to say that it can do nothing besides negate that which we, as judging subjects put forward. One can think of this view as a kind of “scientific method” view of cognition: we, as scientists, put forth hypotheses, that, through experiment, are either provisionally retained, or negated. In the view of quantitative realism, the objective state of affairs is available to us, through our ability to test our objective judgments against reality. We make an objective judgment, and reality weighs in, as it were, on whether such a judgment is tenable.

Fichte sees problems in both the idealist and realist views of quantitative negation that he uses to motivate his final view of negation. Before we move to that final view, let us look at those problems. The problem with quantitative negation, says Fichte, is that it is not at all clear how objectivity can weigh in, how it can be a force of negation when it is the subject that must bring forth both the affirmative judgment and its negation. In Fichte’s words, quantitative realism:

…can simply not explain how a real determination becomes an ideal determination, how a determination existing in itself becomes a determination for the positing Self

…er [der quantitative Realismus] kann schlechterdings nicht erklären, wie eine reale Bestimmung eine ideale, wie eine an sich vorhandene Bestimmung eine Bestimmung für das setzende Ich werden möge. (Fichte, Foundation, 107).

In order words, the issue is how the negation of a judgment occurs. On the level of judgment, which would be in Fichte’s language the “ideal” level, the Self must change its judgment from “A” to “Not-A”. From the ‘ideal’ perspective, it is the ‘positing Self’ that must correct its judgment. And yet, according to quantitative realism, the objective world, the ‘real’, etc. somehow induces, maybe even causally determines, the Self to correct its judgment. But if that were the case, then it is not the Self making the corrective judgment, but rather the outside world determining the Self to judge so, and so it remains a mystery how “a determination in itself becomes a determined for the positing Self”. The dilemma is that the correction of judgment is either an autonomous act undertaken by the subject or an external determination of, imposed on, the subject. As we will see in the following section, Fichte moves away from this dilemma by choosing the the former horn, by arguing that judgment, including the judgment that corrects “A” with “Not-A”, is always autonomous. However, Fichte only accepts a revised version of this horn, arguing that this is an automony that is designed to have a grasp on reality, as evidenced by the fact that every judgment is negatable. In order words, our objective judgments are not externally determined one judgment after the next - for it is the Self who decides whether a judgment holds or not. However, our judgments sui generis claim to be externally determined because they are correctable. The principle of negatability says that judgments are made such as to conform to the external state of affairs, and even if some judgments might at this moment be incorrect, the Self is always considering the correctness of its judgments and adjusting accordingly. In this final picture, the Self judges and corrects its judgments spontaneously, but understands its judgments to always be following what it takes to be the objective state of affairs. The ‘real determination’ of every judgment is not the correction of this or that judgment, but rather the correctability of judgment, in general, a correctability which holds up these judgments as correctable, and therefore as following some external state of affairs.

The problem that Fichte sees with quantitative idealism is that it seems to contradict the Self’s autonomous nature. Why, if the Self is its own judge, i.e. makes its own judgment, would it ever submit itself to a regime where all its judgments are potentially incorrect? In Fichte’s words, quantitative idealism “..is destroyed by an apparent contradiction, namely that it posits absolutely something finite”.¹³

At issue is why a judging subject who is, according to the tenets of Fichte’s philosophical system, unlimited, self-governing, etc would limit itself by allowing for the correction of all its judgments.

As we will see in the next section, Fichte’s answer is that the unity of a judgment and its negation allows the Self to both limit itself to the external state of affairs, and simulatenously think beyond that state of affairs, which is to say, to entertain counter-factuals, to imagine a very different state of affairs, with an eye to finally engaging its practical, i.e. moral capacity to effect change in the world. Fichte’s argument is that the Self recovers some of its ‘infinitude’ through its imaginative capacity to hold, for a certain time, two contradictory thoughts together as one.

Fichtean Negation as the Self-correctability and Dual of judgment

The move from quantitative negation to Fichtean negation occurs by thinking through what it means to say that every judgment hangs together with its negation. Whereas the quantitative view points out that a judgment and its negation are always connected, the Fichtean view delves into the nature of this connection, and emerges with the view that, in some way, a judgment and its negation are always simulatenously present as a unity in the mind of the judging subject. This is the teaching of Fichtean idealism.

Fichte expresses this idea of the unity of negation in his discussion of the terms “substance” and “accidence”:

…substance, when analyzed, yields the accidents, and, after a complete analysis of substance, there is nothing left over but the accidents. A persisting substrate, a possible carrier of accidents, is out of the question; any accident which you chose, is always its own carrier and the carrier of its opposite, and doesn’t require any additional special carrier.

…die Substanz, analysirt, giebt die Accidenzen, und es bleibt nach einer vollständigen Analyse der Substanz gar nichts übrig, als Accidenzen. An ein dauerndes Substrat, an einen etwanigen Träger der Accidenzen, ist nicht zu denken; das eine Accidens ist jedesmal sein eigner und des entgegengesetzten Accidens Träger, ohne dass es dazu noch eines besonderen Trägers bedürfte. (Fichte, Foundation, 124).

We can paraphrase this passage by saying that any objective judgment is fallable. The argument goes like this: one might think that the world exists of substantial and accidendal properties. For example, a tree has the inalienble property of having a trunk, but the accidental property of red leaves. A tree can be a tree without having red leaves, but a tree without a trunk doesn’t exist. Fichte is arguing here that such a view, as it relates to the objective world, is false. There are no essential properties in the objective world, so that every property, or we could say: every judgment about the objective world, is possibly false, i.e. is beholden to experience. Thus whenever we make an objective judgment, we also think, along with that judgment, its negation. To borrow Fichte’s language, we can say that every objective judgment “carries” its own negation.

Fichte gives the example here of making the claim that a piece of iron does not move on its own, i.e. it is an essential property of a piece of iron that it will not move unless it is being moved, i.e. pushed, by another object. However, it turns out that the iron does appear to move on its own, namely when it is near a magnet. Then then leads to the negation of the first claim, premised on the Newtonian laws of motion, and the need to explain the motion of the iron through another principle, in this case, magnetism.

This claim in isolation looks like a repeat of quantitative idealism, but it goes further by considering what it means for the judging subject when one says that a judgment and its negation hang together as a unity. Fichte calls this capacity the “positing of a border”. The idea is that in a border, both the judgment and its negation hold, which is a seeming impossibility. Fichte’s example is the border between light and darkness, where the light ceases and the darkness begins. The border of light and darkness would be that region in which both and neither hold. Of course such a concept of a border violates the principle of non-contradiction, indeed the border is a kind of insistence that a contradiction exists. This border exists insofar as the judging subject, by virtue of his or her imagination, remains opens to the possibility that a judgment is false, even while it stands by whatever judgment it has made. In Fichte’s view, the fallability of judgment also has a flip side, which is the openness, or freedom, or creativity of thought. When we correct a mistaken judgment, we show an ability to think beyond whatever we may, in any moment, hold to be the case. So in the narrow sense, the imagination holds open the possibility that a judgment is false. But in a broader sense, the imagination is constantly working on the inside or opposite side of our judgments, to come to a better, more correct way of looking at things. Such a view is perhaps not interesting regarding simple empirical judgment, such as “This cube is red”, but it most definitely does capture something about humans as intellectual puzzlers, i.e. trying to figure out why a scientific experiment went the way it did, why a computer program is behaving the way it did, or why another individual reacted to us in the way he or she did.

The realist side of Fichtean negation addresses the issue of why we then actually do negate a particular judgment, i.e. why we choose, or are forced to relinquish a judgment. In the theory of quantitative negation, the objective state of affairs weighs in on whether a judgment is correct or not. However, we will remember that this theory doesn’t offer a satisfactory explanation of how this ‘weighing in on’ could happen. In Fichtean negation, the negation of a judgment is entirely up to the judging subject. However, this doesn’t mean that the Self can wantonly choose between judging ‘A’ and ‘Not-A’. Instead, the Self is always trying to get things right. In Fichte’s words, there exists for the Self the “task [Aufgabe] of a determination it has to complete by itself.” It is thus programmed within the Self that the Self’s judgments fulfill the roll of assessing an external state of affairs and not, for example, of creating that state of affairs. The fallibility of judgments is a property that is internal to judgment itself. The fallibility of judgment, properly understood, is the ‘real’ aspect of judgment that Fichte has been looking for all along.

This seems to sidestep the question of how the subject determines whether a judgment is false or not, since there is no longer any external source that is compels us to decide one way or another. One might think, for example, that direct perceptual judgments are externally determined. For example, I might think that the cube sitting infront of me is blue, but then I will look at it is and see that it is red. However, Fichte seems to be saying that judgment is self-determining all the way down. Even the supposedly direct perception (in Kantian terms ‘intuition’) that a cube is red is a judgment. Indeed there is no direct perception that exists separate from judgment. It only seems like there is direct perception because the judgment that I see red is so immediate, so second-nature. What then makes our judgments correct? Perhaps it is that the system of judgments we connect are internally coherent (coherentism). Perhaps it is that the judgments are validated by other people, i.e. the coherentness is an intersubjective coherence. In any case, it is out of the scope to try to solve this puzzle. It is simply important to note here what Fichte is claiming, and the potential can of worms he opens, when he dispenses with the real determination of this or that judgment, and instead opts for the ‘real’ aspect of judgment to be negatability, in general.

The upside to Fichte’s claim that negation is entirely internal to judgment is that he can now bring the realist and idealist theories of negation together. The idealist aspect of Fichtean negation focused on the fact that the judging subject in some way also thinks, or considers, ponders, imagines, etc. the negation of its judgment. The realist aspect focused on the fact that judgments are ‘real’ because they are always oriented to an external state of affairs, which, through their negatibility, they, the judgments, are always trying to get right. Fichte’s claim is that human experience unfolds in the interplay between these two aspects. One the one hand, judging subjects are always trying to get things right. On the other hand, they are fundamentally unsatisfied with their assessments, always striving for new insights, new possibilities. The single concept that unites these two aspects, matter-of-factness, on the one hand, and the desire for new, correct insight, on the other, is negation. The negation of judgment allows for both the corrrectness of judgment and its revision. Indeed, correctness and revision go hand in hand. Without correctness, revision is pointless. Without revision, correctness is illusory.

The internality of negation to all judgment opens up a wide field of human experience that Fichte captures through his discussion of the imagination. No longer does the world consist of my collected judgments, i.e. what I take the world to be. Each and every judgment now carries with it a flip side, in which any or all of those judgments do not hold, and this sends me, i.e. the subject, into an abyss (borrowing Humboldt’s term), which Fichte describes at the “Undeterminate, unlimited, infinite border”.¹⁴ In contemplating all the things that I take to be the case, the negation of all those things resonates within them, and this resonance of negation within judgment is what makes objectivity possible. The objective world determines whether and which of my (objective) judgments stand or fall. Objectivity is taken here, not to be the sum of all judgments I take to be the case, but rather the principle of correction, the principle that all these judgments are not absolute, but rather subject to a higher principle of truth, namely the state of affairs out there, in the world. Fichte calls this resonance of the negation within judgment, the activity of the imagination. In Fichte’s language:

This exchange of the I in and with itself, as it posits itselfs both as finite and inifite - an exchange that, at the same time, consists in a conflict with itself and through this reproduces itself as the I wants to unite that which cannot be united, in one moment attemtps to take up the inifnite in the form of the finite, in another moment, is driven back and posits the inifnite outside of the form of the finite, and in the same moment again attempts to take up the infinite in the form of fininitude - this exchange is the capacity of the imagination.

Dieser Wechsel des Ich in und mit sich selbst, da es sich endlich und unendlich zugleich setzt – ein Wechsel, der gleichsam in einem Widerstreite mit sich selbst besteht, und dadurch sich selbst reproducirt, indem das Ich unvereinbares vereinigen will, jetzt das unendliche in die Form des endlichen aufzunehmen versucht, jetzt, zurückgetrieben, es wieder ausser derselben setzt, und in dem nemlichen Momente abermals es in die Form der Endlichkeit aufzunehmen versucht – ist das Vermögen der Einbildungskraft. (Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, 134-5).

Here, the “infinite” is the unity of the judgment and its negation. It is the state in which both “A” and “Not A” hold, because whether or not “A” or “Not A” is the case, is dependent on something outside, beyond the subject. This outside realm is itself unreachable to the subject, and yet also present as the potential negation of each and every judgment. Because such a moment violates the principle of non-contradiction, i.e. “A” and “Not-A” cannot both hold, the subject is forced to pick one of the conflicting judgments. This happens when the “I attempts again to take it [the infinite] up in the form of finitude.” The infinite is “taken up in the form of finitude” when the subject confines itself to a single judgment. Neverthess, the negation, or dual of this judgment still, via the imagination, exercises its power within one’s thoughts, leading the subject again to “posit itself” as “infinite”, which is to say, open to both the judgment and its negation. In this state, the imagination is asserting its power to, as Fichte formulates it, “hover” or “waver” (schweben) between contradictory judgments.¹⁵

As another commentator has noted, this moment of theoretical imagination quickly gives way to the Fichte’s notion of the practical.¹⁶ In Fichte’s account, we don’t walk around in a state of imaginative openness. Rather, the reason (Vernunft) steps in to stop the wavering fo the imagination. However, the imagination does continue to play a central role in the practical, or moral realm:

In the practical field, the imagination continues into the infinite, to the absolutely indeterminable idea of the a highest unity that would only be possible after a completely infinitude, which is itself impossible.

Im praktischen Felde geht die Einbildungskraft fort ins unendliche, bis zu der schlechthin unbestimmbaren Idee der höchsten Einheit, die nur nach einer vollendeten Unendlichkeit möglich wäre, welche selbst unmöglich ist. (Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, 137).

This is so because in the realm of action, the subject has the power to change things, which is to say, transform a state “A” into “Not-A” or vice versa. In the theoretical realm, the flip between “A” and “Not-A” only comes when the Self finds itself to be mistaken. In the practical realm, every action the Self considers or carries out, brings about change, and thus also a change in the state of things. Considering what is or is not the case becomes, in the practical realm, the question of what could be the case, i.e. one what can achieve, and therefore entails the active consideration of bringing about the reversal of a state of affairs, i.e the negation of what is currently the case. Interestingly, Fichte is making the claim here that when the imagination searches for alternatives, for the flip side of things, as it were, it is also searching for the whole, the so-called “absolutely indeterminable idea of the highest unity”. The suggestion here is that imaginative openness allows humans to strive for a kind of harmony in their experience of themselves and the world. In more concrete terms, the “highest unity” toward which the Self strives in the practical realm is simply the moral good, as becomes clear in the Practical Part of the Foundation. Thus Fichte is saying here that humans’ moral capacity is dependent on our imaginative capacity. Our openness to correction, our ability to consider what is not, or to consider that things are not as they might seem, helps us to act morally, and this moral force also moves toward unity, toward a unified view of our place in the world, that is not actually achievable (Fichte says in the above quote that it’s ‘impossible’), but nevertheless motivating, thanks to the power of negation as it becomes active by virtue of imagination.

Conclusion: Negation as part of the syncategorematic

The Theoretical Part of the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre makes a new and unique contribution to the Idealist project of explaining how thought hangs together. Similar to how Kant argued that every thought hangs together via the unity of apperception, i.e. every thought is my thought, Fichte argues that all thoughts are thought along with their negation. This has important consequences for how we view thought in general. In the case of Kant’s unity of apperception, we recognize thought to be a convolute of judgments that are made by a single judging subject and that hang together insofar as they are all thought by a single subject and are thereby subject to certain principles originating in the subject, such as the Kantian categories, that dictates how they hang together. Two years after the Foundation, in his Foundation of Natural Right, Fichte identifies another such way in which thought hangs together, namely, that all thoughts are intersubjective, which is to say not only thought by this or that judging subject, but are shared, and thought of as inherently sharable, with other judging subjects. This is an insight that Hegel greatly expands on with his theory of spirit. The contribution of the Theoretical Part of the 1794 Foundation to the Idealist project, the insight that negation is internal to all thought, seems to be to be overlooked in our reception of German Idealism. Such an insight never achieved the renown of Kant’s unity of apperception, or Hegel’s concept of spirit. And yet, the internality of negation to thought has far reaching consequences for how we view thought. It ensures and explains not only the fallibility of objective judgment, but also the openness of thought to imagination, as well as the striving character of human experience that catapults humans from thinking about what is the case to wanting to change things.

Another way to express the significance of Fichte’s insight is to invoke Irad Kimhi’s concept of the syncategorematic. Loosely stated, the syncategorematic is that which attends a judgment, but does not add anything to the content of the judgment itself. The syncategorematic aspect of a judgment tells us something about the agents doing the judging, and how they are employing the judgment, but not about the content of the judgment itself.¹⁷ In Kimhi’s account, the assertion “p”, which we can understand as an assertion about the objective world such as “This cube is red”, can be expanded in specific ways that do not add anything, knowledge-wise to the original assertion. Such examples are “I think p”, “She thinks p” and “We think p”. The first example gestures at Kant’s unity of apperception, the latter two at Hegel’s concept of spirit. The syncategorematic aspect of thought that Kimhi focuses on in his book Thinking and Being is negation. To paraphrase Kimhi’s argument, the claim “not p” contains no information over and above “p”. It is simply a different way of applying, or engaging with “p”, much like “I think p”, or “he thinks p” represents other ways of dealing with “p”.

One open question is how this view of the ubiquity of negation changes our relationship to thinking. There appears to be something about acknowledging the nature of negation that leads us away from making airtight discursive arguments, and more towards doing things like contemplating images and stories. This tendency is evident in Fichte’s Foundation insofar as he argues that one needs the imagination to do philosophy.¹⁸ Additional, Fichte’s 1794 Foundation, greatly influenced the German Romanticists, in particular Novalis.¹⁹ It is worth contemplating why the internality of negation to thought seems to leads down a path away from traditional philosophy and into more artistic modes of thought. Perhaps purely discursive mode of thought fails to give enough weight to the role of negation without our thought structures, so that only an indirect road to truth, through things like images and stories, remains.