Beiser's Fichte

This is a summary of what I think top philosopher Frederick C Beiser says about Fichte in a book on German Idealism. At the end I speculate that a lot of contemporary thinking about AI sounds Fichtean because they concede that definitive proof that AI is conscious or not may be impossible and that a better test would be to decide whether the AI can come to exist as a self through its own activity, resistance from a world, and mutual recognition with others. Each of these is a stiff test of course, and the last one depends on what we decide our attitude towards the AI should be. This is an important consideration. Fichte says we are who we are because others mutually recognise us. This is a striking and disturbing claim. But first I shall try and say what Beiser says Fichte says. 

Imagine you push a heavy door. You feel it push back. Kant thinks perception works like that. For me to notice a body acting on me, my own body must be able to react. There is always a two way pull or push. My body and the thing touching me attract and repel one another, and that thing must also attract and repel other things, which in turn interact with still more. In short, all bodies belong to a single field of forces, a continuing web of action and reaction. Because my body is part of that web, I can perceive other bodies in space at all.

This point matters for a debate about whether our experience of the world might be an illusion. Kant argues that my seeing an object in space happens inside the overall system of experience. Think of a football match rather than a single kick. The rules, players, and ball form one game. In the same way, my single perception belongs to a whole, law governed practice of experiencing. If perception sits inside that system, it cannot be mere trickery, because the system requires stable connections between events. Kant calls one key rule in this system the principle of community, the idea that substances in space are in interaction. His later work tries to show in more detail why perception must belong to this shared system, so that the reality of objects in space is secured against the sceptic.Kant also develops a bold idea about the subject, which people later called the doctrine of self positing. The mind does not just receive impressions. It actively sets up, or posits, the order that makes experience possible.  A camera sensor records light, but the camera also has built in settings that shape every photo. In a similar way, we know some features of the world a priori, that is, before and independently of particular experiences, because those features are what our mind contributes. Kant even says this helps explain how physics can be a genuine science. Physics looks for necessary structures and laws, and those structures reflect the ordering activity of our minds.

This sounds like Fichte, who seemed to claim the self creates the world outright. Beiser says Kant uses similar words but does not mean the same thing. For him, the language of self positing is meant to clarify his programme, not to abandon his limits. The mind contributes the form of experience, such as space, time, and the basic ways events hang together, but it does not invent the raw material. Think of a recipe and ingredients. The recipe gives form. The ingredients still need to be brought from Tescos. Physics, on this view, has an a priori side, the plan or structure, and an a posteriori side, the measurements and data. You can classify forces in general before any experiment, but you learn which forces exist and how strong they are by doing experiments.

This turn to self positing also lets Kant unify different parts of the mind. Sensibility, which gives us what is sensed, and understanding, which organises it, both express one underlying activity of self consciousness. The familiar "I think" is not only an act of understanding, it is also involved in how time and space show up for us. Kant further ties together theoretical reason and practical reason under the idea of autonomy. The same capacity that organises knowledge also sets moral law for itself. He later makes autonomy the central principle of his whole system.

Did Kant thereby slide into absolute idealism, where all differences drop away? Beiser says no. He keeps some crucial distinctions. First, form and matter. The mind supplies form, but the matter of sensation is given. Colours, tastes, and sounds come to us through affection, that is, we are affected by objects. Second, understanding and sensibility. They work together, but one is not reduced to the other. Space and time remain pure forms of sense, not concepts. Third, the transcendental and the empirical. The transcendental deals with what must be true for experience to be possible. The empirical deals with what is actually found. Kant warns against mixing these up because that's where all the problems come from.

To protect these borders, he introduces the idea about two levels of appearance. Call the first level appearance. These are perceptions, like individual photos on your phone. Call the second level appearance of appearance. This is experience, the organised album that groups and orders the photos so that a trip makes sense. Understanding creates this second level by connecting perceptions into a single, unified whole, for example, by recognising cause and effect, or that two views are of the same object from different angles. Empirical physics studies the first level through observation and experiment. A priori physics studies the second level by mapping the necessary ways perceptions must fit together. Both are needed. The plan without data is empty. The pile of data without plan is a heap, not a science.

Kant’s talk of self positing also goes with his older idea of self affection. When the mind applies its own forms to itself, it only knows itself as it appears, not as it is in itself. Looking in a mirror gives you knowledge, but you still only see a reflection shaped by the mirror. So self positing, for Kant, does not mean the self creates or fully reveals itself through its appearances. It means the self actively organises the field in which it can encounter both the world and itself.

Put together, the picture is this. I perceive objects in space because my body belongs to a network of interacting forces. My mind contributes the organising rules that make these perceptions hang together as one experience. Science is possible because of this double source, form from us and matter from the world. Kant pushes hard to show how much the mind does, yet he keeps the limits that prevent confusion. We cook with a recipe we bring and ingredients from the supermarket, and only with both do we end up with a meal.

Kant says there are always two main mistakes. First, we can mix up what is in us with what is in the object, taking mere appearances for things in themselves. Second, we can mix up different levels of explanation, taking the conditions that make experience possible for things that we might find inside experience. So to prevent both errors he introduces the idea of an appearance of an appearance. This move keeps his basic distinction between what the mind supplies and what is given. But some thought the first Critique had already blurred that difference, since it says that nothing can count as given unless the understanding can form it. Kant’s answer is careful. The understanding conditions everything we experience, like a rule that shapes all the photos in an album. Still, the raw materials are not created by that rule. They are received through sensibility. So appearances are conditioned by understanding but not created by it. By contrast, appearances of appearances are created by understanding, since they are the form of experience as a whole. 

Kant links this idea to his attempts to justify the ether. The ether, for him, is not a guess about a hidden stuff we could see under a microscope. It is a necessary framework for a world of interacting forces. We cannot confirm it by a single perception, yet it has objective work to do. Here the label appearance of appearance fits well. An appearance of appearance is not inside perception as one more item, yet it belongs to experience because it shapes the whole. In this way Kant shows how some conditions of experience also show up within experience, though only indirectly. This also explains why he keeps talking about boundaries. The form and the matter of experience remain distinct, even if in some cases the form becomes a real element within what we live through, like, for example, a school timetable, which is a form that arranges lessons. The sounds of a teacher’s voice are matter. If the timetable changes the flow of your day, you feel its effect, yet you would not confuse the timetable with a particular sound in the room.

Next Kant turns to the thing in itself. In his late notes he sometimes calls it a principle rather than a separate object. He means that when we explain how our many perceptions count as about one world, we appeal to a formal point, the object as such, which is a rule that unifies. This does not amount to a denial that things in themselves are possible. It says only that their reality cannot help explain objectivity in our experience. He also speaks of the thing in itself as a different standpoint on the same object, where we abstract from all features that belong to our way of sensing. So he neither proves nor disproves its existence. He keeps its status problematic, which fits his limits on what we can know. At the same time he repeats a familiar claim from his moral philosophy. Practical reason gives us grounds to believe in freedom and God even when theory cannot demonstrate them.

It sounds like Fichte because later writers thought Kant’s language about self positing points to a stronger idealism. Some took Fichte to say that an absolute ego creates all of reality. Others read him as a strict subjectivist who traps us inside our own ideas. A better reading, which Fichte’s own published works support, treats his position as a pragmatic idealism. The world we know is shaped by our rational activity, yet much remains given since we are finite. We approach greater independence through action, by making nature answer to our purposes. The absolute ego is not a thing that exists somewhere. It is an ideal that guides moral effort. Against scepticism, Fichte says that knowledge grows from doing, not from mere looking. He works hard to defend the reality of other minds and of an external world, and he argues that self consciousness itself depends on a world and on mutual recognition.

Kant wrote the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, which contains the key B pages, in Königsberg in 1787. His late project on the transition to physics, with the talk of the ether and of appearances of appearances, belongs to the Opus Postumum notebooks that he worked on in Königsberg in the late 1790s and early 1800s, especially around 1799 to 1803. The principle of community and the defence against idealism already feature in the first Critique of 1781 and its 1787 revision, also in Königsberg. Fichte developed his early system, the Wissenschaftslehre, during his Jena years from 1794 to 1799, and published key works in Jena in 1794, 1795, 1796, and 1798. These dates and places matter because they show a live debate between Kant and Fichte across one decade in Prussia and the German universities. Kant refines the grounds of experience from Königsberg, while Fichte in Jena tests how far action and freedom can carry that programme without falling into either solipsism or a new dogma.

In simple terms, Kant’s late idea of an appearance of an appearance is a tool to keep levels clear. It reminds us that the mind not only has single experiences, it also builds the unity that makes them a world. That unity is real in our experience, though not as one more object to see. The ether is his most daring case of such a unifying condition. Fichte then pushes the active side of this picture, placing practice at the root of knowledge, while still admitting that we meet resistance from what is given.

Reinhold thought that the key to mind and knowledge was representation. He said that in every conscious state there are three things. There is a representation, there is a subject who has it, and there is an object that is represented. These three are different from one another, yet they are related. He turned this into what he called the proposition of consciousness. On his view, this single starting point could ground all of Kant’s philosophy. Knowing, willing, and judging all become just different forms of representing. Reinhold developed this programme in Jena in the late 1780s and early 1790s, when he was trying to tidy up Kant’s ideas and present them in a simpler system. Fichte, working through Reinhold’s system in the winter of 1793 to 1794, argued that representation cannot be the first thing. If you look closely, a representation already contains more basic activities. For me to have a representation, I must be able to relate myself to it, to distinguish myself from it, and to take it as about an object. Think of a gamer and her computer screen. It is not enough that coloured pixels appear. The player has to take some shapes as their avatar, other shapes as enemies, and so on. The basic acts of taking and distinguishing are prior to the picture on the screen. So, Fichte says, representations are products. They presuppose deeper acts by which the mind links subject, representation, and object. These acts are not themselves representations. They are ways in which the mind brings representations about.

This is Fichte’s first big break with the older subjectivist tradition. That tradition assumed that ideas or representations were simple and given, like ready made pictures in a gallery. Fichte says that behind the picture there is painting, and behind the idea there is activity. Philosophy should start from acts, not from passive facts. He reached this view while working on Kant and Reinhold in the early 1790s, especially in his notebooks written around 1793 when he was moving from Zurich towards his later post in Jena. Even before that winter, Fichte had gone further than Kant on another issue. The older tradition treated knowledge and action as separate worlds. Theory looked at how things are. Practice dealt with what we do. The mind was seen as a mirror of nature. Fichte began to question this. He came to think that the basic acts behind representation come from desire or will. They are not purely theoretical activities, they are practical. They are driven by aims and by the moral law. By spring 1793 he had already said, in a new introduction to his book on the critique of all revelation, that the first principle of philosophy lies in the faculty of desire, more precisely in the self consciousness of the will through the moral law. That book and its revised introduction were written in German lands in the early 1790s, as Fichte was using Kant’s moral philosophy to think about religion. At that time he still called this first principle a fact of consciousness, so he had not yet fully connected it with the hidden acts beneath consciousness. That further step came after November 1793, when he read new sceptical work and had to sharpen his position.

Fichte’s earlier writings on religion had already stretched Kant’s idea of the primacy of practical reason. Kant, in the Critique of Practical Reason of 1788, had said that moral reason gives us grounds to believe in God and immortality, even though theory cannot prove them. Fichte pushed this further. In his first edition of the book on revelation, printed in 1791, he argued that all the attributes of God can be derived from practical reason alone. He also argued that we must decide the possibility and authenticity of revelation by moral criteria, not by speculative arguments. Most boldly, he claimed that only practical reason can explain how free actions fit into the causal order of nature. We cannot move from facts about how the world is to claims about how it ought to be. But we can and must move the other way, from what ought to be to conclusions about how the world must be structured if moral action is to be possible. This is already the core thought that later shapes his Jena system, the Wissenschaftslehre.

Fichte was not alone in rethinking desire. Reinhold himself had seen that there was a problem in treating the will as just another case of representation. On the one hand, representation aims at knowing what is already there. On the other hand, desire aims at bringing about what is not yet there. You can imagine the difference between looking at a picture of a house and wanting to build a house. Also, you can know the good and still fail to do it. That shows that the will cannot simply be reduced to the intellect’s picture of the good. Reinhold tried to handle this by giving the faculty of desire a more fundamental role. He said that desire has two drives, one towards matter and one towards form, which together generate the content and structure of representations. In effect, he made desire the hidden source of representation.

This move helped Reinhold keep a single root for all the faculties while giving some primacy to the practical side. But it also undermined his original claim that representation itself was the basic fact. Fichte saw the tension. He agreed that there should be a single source for all our powers. Kant had often stressed a deep unity of sensibility, understanding, and reason, and had hinted that freedom is the keystone of his system. If there must be one root, if representation cannot really serve as that root, and if freedom is central, then Fichte concluded that the fundamental power of the mind must be desire. We should see representing as an expression of willing, not willing as a mere function of representing. That is a complete reversal of older rationalism, and it breaks the traditional gap between theory and practice.

From here Fichte develops his doctrine of the primacy of practical reason in several related senses, in his Jena writings from 1794 onwards. In one sense, practical reason has primacy because it explains a basic assumption of theoretical reason, namely that there is an external world. I believe in a world outside me, he says, not because I have proved it in a spectator’s way, but because I need such a world as the field in which I can act and obey the moral law. The world is the sensible material of my duty. Without a world to change, my striving would be empty. In this way, the moral standpoint underpins the very possibility of experience.

In another sense, which is closer to Kant’s second Critique, practical reason has primacy because it justifies certain beliefs that theory cannot prove or disprove. For Kant, this concerns God and immortality. For Fichte, it extends to the belief in our own freedom and in the meaningfulness of our efforts to shape nature. Here again the difference lies in how far Fichte is willing to go. Kant insists that theoretical reason must remain independent and that moral interests cannot dictate what counts as knowledge of nature. Fichte, working in Jena in the mid s1790s, is more ready to let the will set the framework for what counts as an acceptable picture of the world. The timeline and locations help to keep the picture clear. Reinhold’s elementary philosophy was formulated in Jena in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Fichte embraced Kant in 1790, wrote his early religious work in the early 1790s, and by winter 1793 to 1794, between Zurich and his move to Jena, he was criticising Reinhold and shifting the first principle from facts of representation to acts of willing. From 1794 to 1799, as professor in Jena, he worked out the Wissenschaftslehre and the detailed doctrine of the primacy of practical reason. Across these years the centre of gravity in German philosophy moves from thinking of the mind as a mirror filled with representations to thinking of it as an active power of desire that shapes both knowledge and world through its striving.

Fichte now gives his doctrine of the primacy of practical reason three connected meanings, and it helps to unpack each one with an example. First, he takes the familiar moral ideas of God, immortality, and providence and gives them a new role. For Kant, writing in Königsberg in the 1780s, practical reason gave us a right to believe that these things exist, even though we could not prove them by theory. Fichte, working in Jena in the mid to late 1790s, goes a step further. He says we should not treat God, immortality, and providence as things we believe are really there. We should treat them as goals for action. Think of them as targets rather than facts. For example, the idea of a perfectly just order of the world becomes a task, to act as if we are helping to bring such justice about. In this sense, the primacy of practical reason gives us the right to act for the sake of these ideals, not the right to claim that beings beyond experience exist.

This might sound like a break with Kant, and in part it is. But Fichte is also following a Kantian line of thought. In the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique, Kant had already said that the big ideas of pure reason are regulative rather than constitutive. They guide our thinking, but they do not describe actual objects. Fichte simply applies this strictly to God, immortality, and the highest good. They become pure ideals that guide moral practice.Second, practical reason has primacy because knowledge comes out of action rather than mere contemplation. Kant had said we can know a priori only what we ourselves put into objects. Fichte agrees, but he understands our putting in as practical. The key activity is not just the intellect organising what is given. It is the will shaping the world. We know an object only insofar as we bring it under our projects and make it comply with rational demands. A simple picture is a science experiment. You do not just watch nature, you set up a situation, intervene, and see how things respond. For Fichte the whole of cognition is like that. As he later puts it in a popular lecture, we do not act because we already know, we know because we are called to act. Practical reason is the root of all reason.

Third, practical reason has primacy because it provides the warrant for some central assumptions of theoretical reason, such as the existence of an external world. We earlier saw how Fichte argues that I can only justify believing in a world outside me by seeing that world as the arena for moral action. The world is the sensible material of my duty. Without that field, the moral law could not be lived out. That way of arguing, which Fichte develops especially in Jena around 1794 in the first version of the Wissenschaftslehre, turns morality into a condition for the possibility of experience.

At this point it is tempting to see Fichte as a kind of early postmodern. He says knowledge depends on our activity, on what we do and will. But it is important not to project later relativism back onto him. Fichte never abandons the idea that there are universal norms of reason. He believes we create these norms as autonomous beings, in the sense that no outside authority forces them on us. Yet they still have necessity, because they express the basic structure of reason itself. For example, he still expects that maxims must be universalisable and consistent if they are to count as rational. He does not say that what is rational for one culture or time is irrational for another. Here he stays close to the Enlightenment belief in a single human reason. He also does not think that a mere act of choice makes an end rational. We can judge ends themselves by asking whether they meet minimal rational tests. So even though he stresses will and action, he is more a child of Kant and the Enlightenment than a forerunner of thinkers who tie truth only to power or history.

There is, however, a tension. On one side Fichte talks like a foundationalist in the old, almost Cartesian sense. In some methodological writings from the early Jena period he says that philosophy should begin with a self evident starting point, something like “I am”. From that, the philosopher should deduce the conditions that make such a self consciousness possible, and then derive further conditions, until the whole structure of experience is laid out. The model is a bit like geometry. You start from a clear axiom, then draw out a whole system. Fichte hopes not only to deduce Kant’s categories of the understanding in this way, but also space, time, the existence of an empirical manifold, and even some of the most general laws of nature. The dream is that the content of experience would turn out to be nothing but the form fully unfolded. The object would then just be the sum of relations fixed by the imagination’s activity. 

He has two main reasons for wanting this. First, he wants a weapon against the new sceptics. They will only accept a philosophy that starts from what they cannot doubt and then proceeds by strict deduction, so Fichte feels he must play on their ground. Second, he wants to make real the systematic unity of Kant’s philosophy, which Kant himself had promised but never fully managed. A single principle should explain sensibility, understanding, practical reason, and their unity.

At the same time, Fichte’s critique of theoretical reason is so sharp that it seems to destroy this ambitious project from within. He admits, for example, that deduction can never tell us what any particular taste, colour, or sound is like. The basic sensible qualities must simply be given. He sometimes goes further and suggests that even the mere fact that there is a limit to our activity, that there is a “non I” at all, cannot be derived by theory. In his main Jena text of 1794, the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, he insists that his first principle, “the I posits itself absolutely”, cannot itself yield the second principle, that the I posits a not I opposed to itself. The act of pure self affirmation and the act of encountering resistance are opposed in kind. Theoretical reason runs into contradictions if it tries to show how a purely active subject can also be passive and affected.

He also observes that theoretical deductions rely on a principle of sufficient reason, which treats every state as caused by an earlier state. That principle, he notes, is at odds with genuine freedom. He even says that the entire theoretical Wissenschaftslehre is a kind of systematic Spinozism, a rational structure of necessity. If that is so, then the first principle of his system, human freedom, cannot be grounded by theoretical reason at all. So how can he both criticise theoretical reason in this way and still talk like a foundationalist. The key is to see what exactly he is attacking. His critique is aimed at a particular kind of deduction, where the premises are taken as constitutive descriptions of what exists, and where one tries to prove the existence of the world or of entities from the bare fact of the I. Fichte comes to think that theoretical reason can never prove existence, whether of God, of the soul, or of the external world. Existence claims need practical grounding, through our projects and needs as agents.

In other words, Fichte does not throw out transcendental philosophy. He does not say that we must give up on explaining the conditions of experience. He does say that theoretical reason, by itself, cannot carry out a constitutive proof that some thing is there. The foundational role shifts. The first principle remains a description of free self activity, but the full justification of a world, of other minds, and of nature now involves practical reason as well. Fichte’s Jena writings of the later 1790s can be read as a prolonged attempt to hold these pieces together, keeping the clarity and ambition of a deductive system while accepting that action, freedom, and moral striving have to stand at its core.

So Fichte’s attack on certain kinds of reasoning is quite precise. He is not saying we must give up reasoning or give up transcendental philosophy. He is targeting one special kind of argument, which he calls constitutive. A constitutive deduction tries to prove that something exists, for example the world, starting from the bare fact that the ego exists. It treats its first claim as a description of what is really there, then tries to derive further realities from it. Fichte comes to think that theoretical reason can never prove existence in this way. It cannot prove that God exists, or that the soul exists, and not even that an external world exists. The existence of the world has to be simply taken as given for theoretical reason. However, he does not stop there. He thinks we can arrive at a kind of proof from regulative principles. A regulative principle tells us what we ought to do, not what is already the case. It has the form of a command, like an instruction in a game or a moral law. Fichte’s key thought, developed in Jena around 1794, is that the true explanation for why we have an external world is that it is the necessary field for our moral action. The world is the medium through which we can carry out our duties. So we cannot demonstrate the world through theory, but we can show that we are obliged to accept its reality through practice. Practical reason gives us not only permission but an obligation to believe in whatever is required for us to act morally at all. In this way Fichte extends Kant’s idea of moral postulates. Kant, in Königsberg, had treated God and immortality as postulates. Fichte adds the external world itself to this list.

This changes what a transcendental argument looks like. In Kant, such an argument usually asks for the conditions under which a certain sort of knowledge is possible, for example the conditions for having experiences that are stable and lawful. In Fichte’s Jena writings, a transcendental argument asks for the conditions under which we can obey a certain imperative in the sensible world. The starting point is not a statement like “I know X” but a command like “You ought to act in this way” and the question is what world must exist if this command is to be livable. At first glance this sits badly with Fichte’s earlier talk about first principles. His main Jena work of 1794 begins with “I am” as if it were a plain descriptive fact, the clearest thing we can state. That sounds like a constitutive starting point. But Fichte himself insists that his first principle is really a postulate. It is not a report about a state of affairs inside me. It is a demand to make myself a free, self conscious subject. The original form of the principle is closer to “Act so that you are self conscious and free” than “You happen to exist right now”. Fichte stresses this point again in his 1798 lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo, also given in Jena, and he already saw it in outline in 1793 when he wrote his early Meditations on the elementary philosophy.

So he both is and is not a foundational thinker. If you look at theoretical reason on its own, he rejects the old foundationalist dream. There can be no chain of purely descriptive premises that proves the existence of the world. But if you look at practical reason, he keeps a kind of foundation. There is still a highest principle, a basic demand of freedom, from which the rest of the system is derived. The first principle is not an obvious fact, it is a practical postulate. The system is not self supporting through inner coherence alone, as Hegel later suggests in Berlin. Its truth still depends on its first practical principle.

This sets the scene for his battle with scepticism. Fichte’s first serious doubts about Kant’s system appear in early 1793, before he had even read some of the famous critics in full. In a letter draft written that February, he says that he had long thought the critical system was an unassailable fortress. Then, after a conversation with an independent thinker, he suddenly felt that the first principle of Kant’s philosophy was insecure and that this might lead to a kind of empty scepticism worse than Hume’s. The independent thinker was almost certainly Johann Friedrich Schulz, a theologian and philosopher in Königsberg who knew Kant personally and had written careful commentaries on the Critique. Schulz already had deep worries about the transcendental deduction, Kant’s central argument in the first Critique. In a review published in 1785 he pointed out that Kant seems to slide between two meanings of experience. If experience means just bare reports of sensations, such as “this stone feels warm when the sun shines”, nothing in such reports gives you necessity. You could imagine the warmth and the light going apart. If experience means already judged and ordered states, like “the heat of the sun causes the warmth of the stone”, then of course it involves necessity, but now it looks as if Kant has simply built the conclusion into the definition. Schulz asks, what right do we have in the first place to turn raw impressions into necessary connections. It is here that the old Humean worry returns. Perhaps everything we live through is only a stream of loosely linked impressions.

Fichte reads not only Schulz, but also Solomon Maimon and Ernst Platner, during 1793 in the German university world. He realises that these neohumean critics think Kant’s deduction assumes what it needs to prove. It begins from the thought that there are universal and necessary empirical judgements, then argues that categories must apply to experience, which is exactly the point that was in question. This wave of scepticism becomes especially clear to Fichte when he reads Schulz’s book Aenesidemus, printed in 1792 and widely discussed in Jena. Fichte is asked to review it for a literary journal in 1793 and he takes months because it shakes him so much. In letters from late 1793 he says that Aenesidemus has shaken his system to its foundations and made clear that the critical philosophy must be rebuilt on new ground.

Schulz’s book attacks Kant on two fronts. First, it claims that Kant’s idealism collapses into a complete subjectivism, where reality is nothing more than forms of our mind. The charge is that Kant fails to distinguish himself from Berkeley. Second, it offers a meta critique. It argues that Kant’s own transcendental claims fall under the same limits as the first order claims he criticises. For example, if all knowledge is of appearances, then Kant’s talk of the faculty of knowledge or of a transcendental subject should itself count only as appearance, not as knowledge of something in itself.

Fichte’s reply, written in Jena at the start of 1794, is important for his later idealism. To the first charge, he replies that Schulz assumes an old criterion of truth. Schulz takes truth to be correspondence between our ideas and things in themselves. If Kant rejects things in themselves in this strong sense, then Schulz concludes that all truth becomes dreamlike. Fichte says the real mistake lies in the starting point. It makes no sense to talk about a thing that would exist entirely outside any possible conception by a rational being. The very idea of a thing in itself as completely beyond thought is empty. What is true for any possible intellect, when it follows the universal laws of understanding, is what is true in reality. There is no further reality behind that, waiting to be checked. From this Fichte draws a general principle. What is logically valid for any rational subject is also valid in reality. There is no higher standard than the basic laws of thought. Like Kant, he takes conformity to these laws as the criterion of objectivity. But he goes further than Kant by dismissing the thing in itself. Kant, in Königsberg, keeps a formal distinction between our way of experiencing and a possible way things might be in themselves. Fichte in Jena is willing to say that we should not even entertain such a thing in itself if it is completely outside the forms of sensibility and understanding. This move makes his idealism more radical, which in some ways only strengthens the suspicion of subjectivism.

The second front, the meta critique, is harder. Schulz argues that Kant’s talk of the faculty of knowledge, of causality, and of a transcendental subject all presupposes exactly the kind of knowledge Kant denies. Fichte answers this by shifting how we think about the subject. Schulz imagines the mind as if it were a sort of thing, round or square, existing on its own and then having representations. He then asks how we can know this thing, and whether our knowledge really matches it. Fichte says that is the wrong picture. A subject is not a thing that sits behind its own representations. It is essentially self conscious. Who we are depends on how we take ourselves to be. So the basic principle should be that the I is what it is for the I. The faculty of representation exists only for and through representation. There is no mind that is a hidden thing first and only later becomes aware.

From this principle Fichte draws three linked ideas. Methodologically, any account of the mind must be one that the mind itself could accept from within. We cannot understand consciousness by standing outside it, as a physicist might stand outside a system of bodies. We must interpret its activities in terms of its own self understanding. Ontologically, the subject does not fully exist in its nature without its self conceptions. Its being and its self grasp belong together. Ethically, the essence of the ego lies in self determination, in making itself what it is. The categorical imperative for the I is to become autonomous, to make itself free and independent.

This principle guides Fichte’s later Jena lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre. Large parts of his 1794 Grundlage and especially his 1798 nova methodo course consist of a careful dialogue of consciousness with itself. The philosopher first proposes certain structures as hypotheses. Then he lets the I speak and checks whether those structures match the I’s own self explanation. The system is built from within, as the subject recognises itself.

All this rests on an important decision about limits. Transcendental philosophy, in Fichte’s hands, must remain strictly within what can be given in possible experience and reflection on it. It should not leap to transcendent entities like a thing in itself beyond any conception. Once such entities enter, the old sceptical troubles return. Schulz’s objections then hit their mark. Fichte thinks Kant, especially in his later writings, never fully follows through on this strict discipline and keeps some of the old language of things in themselves. That difference, which becomes clear around 1798 and 1799, contributes to the eventual break between the older Kant in Königsberg and the younger Fichte in Jena. Finally, we should keep Fichte’s review of Aenesidemus in perspective. It contains seeds of a very strong idealism, especially the rejection of the thing in itself and the claim that reality and the laws of thought are inseparable. But at this stage Fichte is not yet ready simply to declare that the ego creates all content. He will later reintroduce something like a limit or check on the ego’s activity, a role similar to Kant’s thing in itself, in order to make sense of resistance, effort, and the fact that our striving never reaches complete control. His reading of another sceptic, Solomon Maimon, who wrote in Berlin in the 1790s on transcendental philosophy and new logic, plays an important part in this further development.

Fichte’s last move against scepticism grows directly out of this picture of striving, and out of Maimon’s own way of putting the problem. Maimon, writing in Berlin in the early 1790s, had summed up the whole trouble in what he called a universal antinomy of thought. On the one hand, thinking always needs something given. There must be some material or content to which we apply our general rules. On the other hand, our ideal of knowledge is that nothing is simply given and that everything is created and shaped by understanding. A godlike intellect would not wait for something to appear. It would produce its object entirely by its own activity. For human beings that creates a tension. We are finite, so we receive raw sensations we have not chosen, like sudden pains, unexpected colours, or sounds. Yet we still hold up as our ideal the intellectus archetypus, the archetypal intellect of God, which creates its objects through thought alone. Maimon says this gap cannot be healed in theory. Instead, he suggests, we should treat the divine intellect as a regulative ideal. It is a goal to aim at, not a state we actually reach. If we actively try to bring nature under rational control, if we design experiments, build machines, reform institutions, we can gradually reduce the merely given side of experience and increase the part shaped by understanding. We will never become God, but we can come closer.

Fichte picks up this idea and makes it central to his own response, in Jena around 1793 and 1794, especially in the third part of his Grundlage and in his popular lecture Bestimmung des Menschen. He formulates a similar antithesis. As finite beings we find ourselves acted on by a world outside us. Our senses are passive. We feel cold, pressure, hunger, whether we like it or not. Yet reason, expressed in the moral law, demands complete autonomy. It commands us to become only what we make ourselves to be. That ideal can only be realised if we one day have full control over nature, so that nothing external can simply impose itself on us. Complete independence is of course something only a divine understanding could enjoy. Only such a mind could create the whole natural world in line with its own purposes. For human beings this status is an unattainable limit. Still, Fichte says, the only way to respond to this predicament is to strive towards that ideal. We must constantly work to bring more and more of nature under rational control, and to reduce the share of blind passivity. Think of the way medicine reduces the power of disease, or engineering reduces the threat of floods. In each case a bit of what once simply happened to us becomes something we can foresee and shape. As this happens, our passive, merely sensible side shrinks and our rational side grows. 

Here Fichte and Maimon very nearly meet. Both say that the ideal of knowledge is the divine or archetypal intellect. Both see the split between understanding and sensibility as the chief obstacle to that ideal. Both say that this split can be narrowed in practice. The important difference is that Fichte now sets this in moral terms. The drive to reduce the given is not just an intellectual wish but a categorical imperative. We ought to strive for greater independence because our freedom and dignity depend on it. This is where the primacy of practical reason becomes Fichte’s final answer to scepticism. Earlier he had said that knowledge is the result of action rather than contemplation. Applied to the sceptical problem, this means that we will not overcome radical doubt by building more and more complex arguments from self evident facts. The sceptic can always ask one more time whether our concepts really apply to what we experience. Instead, the cure lies in what we do. If we really can act on the world, and if our actions succeed in making the world conform better to rational plans, then we have evidence in deed that our concepts and rules are not empty. For example, if physics says that certain forces will support a bridge, and we build the bridge and it stands, that successful action shows a fit between our concepts and experience. It does not refute the sceptic by a pure proof. It sidesteps him by showing that his doubts do not prevent us from steadily increasing our control and understanding.

So for Fichte, working in Jena in the mid 1790s, the story comes together like this. Kant in Königsberg had given a powerful framework, but left a sharp dualism between understanding and sensibility, and between theory and practice. The new sceptics in the 1790s, especially Schulz and Maimon, showed that as long as this dualism stands as something rigid, sceptical doubts can be pushed inside the system itself. Fichte’s reply is to soften the dualism, to bring in the productive imagination as the power that shapes objects for us, and above all to let practical reason take the lead. We do not start from a bare fact that “I exist” and build the world out of it as a proof. We start from a postulate that “I must be free” and then ask what world, what powers, and what forms of knowledge are needed if that demand is to be even approximately fulfilled. The sceptic’s objections remain impressive at the level of abstract argument. Fichte does not think we can silence them once and for all in theory. But by placing action, striving, and moral autonomy at the centre, he believes we can live and think in a way that steadily undercuts their force.

So Fichte thinks scepticism can never really be defeated while we stay inside pure theory. As long as we only think about the world, and do not act upon it, the split between subject and object remains in place. I stare at the world, it stares back, and I can always ask whether my concepts really match what is “out there”. In that frame, the sceptic always has one more question.The key idea, developed in Jena in the early 1790s, is that acting on the world actually changes the object side of the relation. When we act successfully, we literally make parts of the world conform to our rational plans. The gap between mind and world shrinks, not because we have found a better argument, but because the world has been partly remade in the image of our concepts. Building a bridge that stands, curing an illness, organising a just institution, all of these are cases where form is imposed on what began as given material. In that sense knowledge is not something that sits in front of the will, it is something that emerges from the will’s historical work. Fichte thinks the whole “subjectivist tradition” from Descartes through the German rationalists made the same basic mistake. It treated knowledge as a matter of contemplation. On that picture, the mind is a kind of mirror that reflects the world. You ask whether the image in the mirror matches the thing, and you try to answer with purely theoretical proofs. This is what he thinks both Schulz and Maimon are still doing in Königsberg and Berlin. Against this, he allies himself with a different lineage, which runs through Francis Bacon’s New Organon and its call to put nature “on the rack” by experiment. Bacon had already said that scepticism cannot be refuted by subtler scholastic arguments. It can only be undercut by actually making nature obey our laws. That is why Fichte and Kant both put a Bacon epigraph on their books.

From here Fichte widens the frame. In the Jena lectures of the mid 1790s he does not just want a clever answer to Schulz or Maimon. He wants to define what “idealism” itself means. He takes over Kant’s vocabulary, but he uses it in a different way and in a different context. Kant in Königsberg had framed his project around a rather narrow problem. How are synthetic a priori judgements possible, that is, judgements that extend our knowledge but are still necessary and universal. Fichte in Jena is worried about something broader. How can any representation at all correspond to an object, if mind and world seem so unlike each other. For him, this issue arises for ordinary empirical judgements as much as for the special class of synthetic a priori ones. It is shaped by the intensive debate of the late 1780s and 1790s about Kant’s dualisms, especially the splits between understanding and sensibility, and between appearances and things in themselves.

Within that setting he proposes a clean division. There are only two basic ways to explain experience. Either you explain it from the side of the subject, or from the side of the object. He calls the first option “criticism” or “idealism” and the second “dogmatism”. Criticism says that experience is the product of the I that exists “in itself”, the self that posits and organises its world. Dogmatism says that experience is the result of the thing in itself, which acts on us and is prior to all consciousness. Fichte then links this to a dramatic ethical choice that was very alive in the 1790s, under the influence of the Spinoza revival. Criticism protects the reality of freedom, because it makes the subject pure activity. Dogmatism tends to fatalism, because it reduces the subject to a passive outcome of natural processes. For Fichte the real conflict is therefore between Kant’s critical idealism, properly radicalised in Jena, and Spinoza’s thoroughgoing naturalism.

On the surface this sounds very close to Kant’s own contrast between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism. Kant too says that idealism makes objects conform to concepts, while realism makes concepts conform to objects. Kant too worries that realism collapses into a kind of Spinozist determinism. However, there are important differences. Kant preserves a distinction between appearances and things in themselves, and he insists that we only know the former. Fichte’s “criticism” removes that distinction. It explains all experience solely as the product of the subject, and it aims to purge the thing in itself from the system altogether. Conversely, Fichte’s dogmatism is not just “realism” in Kant’s sense. It is specifically a monistic materialism that explains everything by natural law. He is not interested in a two realm dualism where mind and matter both have some independent standing. For him dualism is the problem, not a possible solution.

Fichte’s language becomes explicitly metaphysical at this point. In the Grundlagen lectures of 1794 he describes the first principle of idealism as the “absolute ego”, unconditioned by anything outside itself. He calls it infinite and “in itself”. These expressions come straight from the older metaphysical tradition, especially from Spinoza’s Ethics, where substance is defined as that which is conceived through itself and is unlimited by anything else. Fichte is quite conscious of this background. He explicitly presents his Wissenschaftslehre as the antithesis and cure of Spinoza’s system.

The metaphysical terms are meant to capture something about the transcendental standpoint. The fundamental ground of experience cannot be a determinate thing among others. Anything that is determinate must be compared and contrasted, and that process presupposes a more basic unity that makes comparison possible. That is why Fichte says the absolute ego has no predicates. It is not the “sum of all properties”. It is the formal ground on which any property can be ascribed. In this sense he can say that both criticism and dogmatism require an “absolute” principle. The dogmatist makes the unconditioned object, Spinoza’s substance or the thing in itself. The critic makes the unconditioned subject, the I that posits itself.

This also explains why he takes Spinoza as the pure form of “realism”. In Spinoza’s Amsterdam of the late seventeenth century the one infinite substance stands outside all finite minds. It is not within consciousness. For Fichte that is exactly what the realist wants, a principle that is not for the subject and that nonetheless explains the subject. By contrast, Fichte insists that the absolute ground must be understood from within consciousness. To talk about an “absolute ego” is not to say that there is literally nothing outside my personal experience, it is to say that any account of experience must be given in terms which the subject could itself recognise and endorse. That is what he means when he repeats, in the Jena manuscripts of 1793 and 1794, that “the I is what it is for the I”.

Why, then, does he not simply dismiss dogmatism as nonsense. Early on, in the review of Schulz’s Aenesidemus in 1793, he comes close to doing so. There he claims that the very idea of a thing in itself, completely independent of any possible thought, is the idea of something unthinkable. To assert it is to destroy it. He also argues that to make such a thing the cause of our representations misuses the category of causality beyond its proper domain. Those arguments already contain the main elements of his later rejection of dogmatism. However, in the Jena introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre of 1797 he becomes more cautious. He admits that the dogmatist’s principle is at least thinkable if it is treated as a necessary hypothesis for explaining experience. He even grants that dogmatism can reinterpret our apparent consciousness of freedom as a product of ignorance about natural law. Because of this he sometimes says that there is no purely theoretical way to decide between the two systems. Every proof presupposes a starting point, and here the starting points are exactly what is in dispute. In those passages he suggests that the decision will ultimately be practical and personal. You choose between freedom and necessity as you choose a way of life.

Even so, he does not give up the attempt to show that dogmatism fails as an explanation. In the same 1797 text he returns to the attack. The central point is again his principle that the subject is essentially for itself. Self consciousness is not an optional extra. It is built into what it is to be a subject. In the mind there is always a double aspect. There are the representations, and there is the awareness of having them. Fichte speaks of a double series, being and the awareness of being. In the case of physical things there is only a single series. A stone or a star exists whether or not anyone is conscious of it. It does not carry its own self awareness with it. Dogmatism, as he sees it, treats the mind like one more thing in the series of nature. It tries to explain representations as effects of material causes that precede them in time and transmit energy to them. In other words it uses a mechanical model. Fichte thinks that this can never yield self consciousness, because mechanical effects do not, as such, know themselves. The stone can be pushed about indefinitely and it will never become aware of being pushed. The law of inertia expresses exactly this passivity. But a subject is not merely pushed around. It knows itself as the one that is being affected, and it can in turn react. Any philosophy that explains consciousness wholly in terms drawn from the third person description of nature will miss this reflexive structure. It will fail to capture what is distinctive about the “for itself” side of the subject.

From this he concludes that idealism is not just one option among others. It is the only way to respect the internal character of experience. Dogmatism hypostatises the transcendental, which means it takes something that should function as a condition within consciousness and treats it as a thing standing outside. Idealism, by contrast, keeps the account strictly immanent. It looks for the principles of explanation within the subject’s own activity. This is why Fichte insists, all through his Jena period, that a true Wissenschaftslehre must be both monistic and inward looking.

The fate of the “thing in itself” in all this is complicated. For the young Fichte in 1793, writing in response to Schulz, the phrase names what is radically unthinkable. It designates something put beyond both sensibility and understanding. That, he says, is an absurd notion. Later he also rejects the idea of the thing in itself as a transcendental cause of appearances, working behind the scenes to produce our experience. He points out that this mixes empirical and transcendental standpoints and misuses causality. Yet he never quite throws the notion away. In one sense, which is close to Kant’s own “noumenon” or “transcendental object”, he accepts a purely ideal thing in itself. This is not a hidden physical thing, it is the way reason must think the object if experience is to have unity and objectivity. Understood like this, the thing in itself is really a rule of synthesis rather than a special entity. Fichte can accept this because it stays within his immanent framework. It is a product of the subject’s own necessary laws.

Moreover, in the later parts of the Grundlage he reintroduces something very like Kant’s thing in itself in the form of a “check” or Anstoss. Here he says that the ego encounters an opposition to its activity, something it cannot fully absorb or create. All the determinate features we ascribe to this resisting element are posited by the ego, but there is a residual sense in which it is simply there, confronting us. This is his way of accounting for the fact that our freedom is finite. We do not, here and now, create the whole world as God might. There is always something we bump up against.

This raises a problem. The check seems to act on us, at least in the form of feelings that spur us into activity. If it really acts, then we are once more applying causality beyond experience. That looks like a return to exactly what he criticises in Kant and the “dogmatic Kantians”. Fichte responds by distinguishing representation from feeling. Representations have objective form. They enter into judgements. Feelings are sheer states of being affected, prior to any conceptual articulation. Perhaps, he suggests in Jena around 1795, we can say that we only ever represent things as appearances, but we feel them as things in themselves. In feeling we have an immediate contact with what resists us, without illegitimately applying concepts to it. That move is ingenious, though many commentators doubt it really resolves the tension. In the end the most stable part of Fichte’s position is not his account of the thing in itself, but his turn to freedom. When he calls the Wissenschaftslehre “the first system of freedom” he means two things. First, idealism is valuable because it is the only framework that makes genuine moral freedom possible. Second, freedom itself becomes the basic explanatory principle. In the later Jena period, especially in the 1798 System of Ethics, he defines freedom as the capacity of the I to give itself its own law, and to act in accordance with it. The self consciousness of freedom, lived and experienced in action, becomes his first principle for deducing the world of objects. The sensible world is then read as the necessary field in which that freedom can become actual, the scene on which an autonomous agent discovers itself and tests its powers.

Fichte thinks we have to keep two different ideas of freedom apart if we are going to make any sense of moral responsibility. First, there is freedom as pure will. This is will as identical with the moral law itself, the categorical imperative. In that sense the will is nothing other than reason’s own lawgiving. It cannot be weak, it cannot go wrong, it simply is what ought to be. Because of that, Fichte says it cannot really be an object of consciousness. It is a condition of consciousness, like the light in a room rather than one of the objects you can see within the room. Second, there is freedom as choice. This is what Fichte calls Wille kür. It is the power you experience when you feel that you could either tell the truth or lie, help or ignore, work or be lazy. Freedom in this sense always appears to us as a “might do” and a “might not do”. It is bound up with the experience of being under a law that we may or may not obey. We hear the moral law as a demand that addresses our sensible, changeable side. Because pure will sits too deep to be experienced, and because responsibility concerns our actual decisions, Fichte concentrates his analysis on choice. That is the concept he unpacks in the System of Ethics and again in the new method version of the Wissenschaftslehre.

His little thought experiment with the steel spring is meant to fix our intuitions. A steel spring resists pressure. It is not simply passive. When it is compressed it pushes back. In that sense the spring has a principle of motion within itself. Yet we do not say that the spring is free. Why not? Our first answer is that the spring is not free because it acts by necessity. Given a certain force, it will deform and then return in a lawlike way. It cannot do otherwise while remaining the same spring. So it looks as if freedom must exclude necessity and require the power to do otherwise. Fichte then asks us to flip the case. Imagine a magical spring that sometimes responds to pressure and sometimes does not, in a way that follows no predictable rule. Now there is no strict necessity, but we still would not call this freedom. We would say that the spring behaves randomly. Its movements are by chance and for no reason.

So we seem to want both of these at once. Freedom must exclude strict natural necessity, yet it must also exclude mere chance. Our decisions must not be mechanically forced by causes, but they also must not be arbitrary. There has to be some reason why we choose as we do. Fichte thinks any plausible theory of freedom must satisfy both demands. That is why he rejects two familiar lines of thought. He rejects compatibilism, the view that actions can be both completely determined by natural causes and genuinely free. If genuine choice involves the real possibility of doing otherwise, then actions that are fully fixed in advance by external causes are not free in the required sense. He also rejects indifferentism, the idea that the will can choose without any reason at all. That would not be freedom but emptiness.

His own proposal is that free actions are explained by reasons rather than by causes. He uses the language of practical syllogism: something like “One ought to give priority to honesty; this situation is a case where honesty is at stake; therefore I ought to tell the truth”. In an action that is truly free, the “therefore” is not a causal shove but a rational link. The end or purpose is grasped by the agent’s thinking, and the will aligns itself with that end. Suppose you decide to apologise to a friend you have hurt. There are many causal stories one might tell. Perhaps you slept well, perhaps a book you read made you reflective, perhaps you saw a film that put you in a certain mood. Fichte will not deny that such factors exist. But he will say that what makes the act free is not these background conditions. It is that you see reconciliation as something that ought to happen, you represent that end to yourself, and you then choose to act for that end. The explanation proper to freedom is “because this is what I judge right”, not “because my neurons fired in a certain way”.

Fichte also wants to exclude another mistake. Many living things act for ends. A plant grows towards the light, an animal hunts for food, a spider builds a web that is well adapted to catching insects. These are purposive activities, but not free ones. The plant and spider do not choose those ends. They are following a kind of inner necessity. So free action, for Fichte, is purposive activity that is chosen by a self conscious rational being. It requires both an end and a decision. He sums this up with the word “self determination”. The free self, he says, exists in some sense before any particular trait or action. It can then determine itself to be this or that through its choices. The self does not just happen to acquire a set of properties. It makes them its own. In the case of a thing, by contrast, essence and existence cannot be pulled apart. A triangle cannot choose to have four sides. A lump of gold cannot decide not to be heavy and yellow. Their being simply is the determinate set of properties they have, and they cannot have others without ceasing to be what they are.

Fichte’s account of self determination is quite radical. It does not say that there is a fixed inner essence which choice gradually unfolds. It says rather that there is no fixed nature there in advance. Who I am is exactly what I make of myself through free acts. “Who am I really” on this view can only be answered by looking at what one has willed oneself to be. There is no script already written for your character. Of course you are born with certain tendencies and into a certain environment, but your “who I am” is something you must still build, by deciding what to value and acting accordingly. This anticipates later existentialist ideas. Fichte already insists that the self is, in a deep sense, nothing but what it makes of itself. At the same time, he is realistic. He knows that most of what we actually are in everyday life depends on heredity and environment. So he treats full self determination as an ideal, a target rather than an achieved state. We are formally free, in that we can form ends and act for them, but materially shaped by nature. The ethical task is to reshape what has been given by nature so that it increasingly matches the standards of reason. That cannot be done in a single leap. It is a long struggle. If we link this to his concept of subjectivity we begin to see the larger picture. Fichte identifies the essence of the “I”, the ego, with subject object identity. That sounds opaque, but he is trying to capture two linked features: freedom and self consciousness.The self is not just free. It is free in a way that involves being aware of itself as free. It also is not just conscious. Its self consciousness is the consciousness of an agent that can determine itself. Both elements had been present in Kant. Kant says that rational beings legislate their own moral laws, and he speaks of the unity of apperception as the “I think” that must accompany all my representations. Fichte takes these strands and ties them together more tightly.

He distinguishes two sides of the self. There is a subjective or ideal side, which consists in thinking, representing, reflecting, forming concepts and plans. There is also an objective or real side, which consists in willing and acting, in actually carrying out the plans. When you deliberate about whether to become a doctor, a musician, or a lawyer, you are operating on the ideal side. When you commit to one path and begin to take concrete steps, you are on the real side. From the standpoint of ordinary awareness it is natural to talk about “thought” and “will” as separate. From the standpoint of his transcendental theory, Fichte wants to show that these are two aspects of one process. If thinking remained entirely idle, it would not be truly self knowledge. If willing were blind, without self understanding, it would not be truly free. That is why he says the self is subject object identity. The same being that represents itself is also the being that determines itself. This idea becomes especially clear in his notion of the “self positing ego”. In the Grundlagen he formulates his first principle as “the ego posits itself absolutely”. This has two sides.

First, the I posits itself when it becomes conscious of itself, when it says “I am”. To do that it must make itself an object. It must in some way stand back and take itself as something it can think about. That is the subjective side. Second, the I also posits itself when it acts, when it makes itself into something determinate in the world. By choosing and doing, it gives itself a character and a history. It turns general possibilities into specific realities. That is the objective side.When both are seen together, self consciousness and freedom appear as two moments of a single movement. In knowing myself I am already in the process of making myself. In making myself I am guided by self conceptions, by images of what I am and what I ought to be. For Fichte that circularity is not a problem to be solved. It is the living structure of subjectivity.

For Fichte, this kind of awareness of oneself acting cannot be awareness of something already given, sitting there like a finished object waiting to be inspected. If what I am trying to know is my own activity, then the knowing and the acting have to coincide. If I only looked at a ready made “state” of myself, I would be treating myself as a thing in nature, something determined by causes. That is exactly what he wants to avoid. So intellectual intuition, in his sense, is the immediate awareness “I am doing this” or “I am determining myself in this way”. It is not an inference, such as “I see these effects, therefore I must have acted”. It is more like what you feel when you consciously decide “I will apologise now” and at the same time take the first steps to do it. You do not first observe a neutral inner state and then interpret it. The awareness comes with the decision and the beginning of the act itself.

This is why he insists it is both intuitive and intellectual. It is intuitive because it is immediate. You do not prove it by argument and you do not reach it by applying a general concept to a particular. You simply experience yourself as acting. It is intellectual because in this case the “object” of awareness is not something that affects you from outside but something you yourself bring about. You create what you know by doing it. In knowing that you are committing yourself to a promise, you do not merely register a fact, you make the promise. It is easy to misunderstand this and make it sound mystical, as if Fichte thought we magically bring ourselves into existence from nothing. He does not need that. The point is more modest and more precise. When I know myself as active, I cannot treat that activity as just another event among events. If I did, I would be describing it under the principle of sufficient reason, as an effect of prior causes, and so I would no longer be grasping it as free. To preserve the idea of a free act I need a kind of awareness that does not subordinate it to independent causes. Intellectual intuition is his name for that awareness. Suppose you wake up and notice that your heart is beating faster. You might explain that by saying you had a bad dream or drank too much coffee. Here you treat the fast heartbeat as an effect and look for its causes. Now compare that to deciding to stand up to speak in a difficult meeting. In that case, if you describe your decision only as the outcome of causes, you have left something important out. The decision is also your taking a stand, your endorsement of a course of action. Intellectual intuition is meant to capture the awareness of yourself as the one who takes that stand. Because of this, Fichte links intellectual intuition directly with freedom. In intellectual intuition, the self knows itself precisely as self determining. It is not simply aware that something is happening in it, but that it is the one who initiates what happens. The subject who knows and the subject who acts are one and the same. That is why he likes to say that in this intuition subject and object are identical. There is no gap between “the I that looks” and “the I that is looked at”.

This helps him in two connected ways. First, it lets him reject Kant’s mysterious noumenal self. He no longer needs an unknowable “X” behind experience to guarantee freedom. The self as free is not something hidden behind appearances. It appears in the very awareness we have of ourselves as acting. Second, it allows him to tie together freedom and self consciousness instead of keeping them apart. On Kant’s picture, the more we know ourselves as objects, the more we seem to fall under causal laws and so the less room there is for freedom. On Fichte’s picture, genuine self knowledge and genuine freedom belong together. To know oneself truly is to know oneself as engaged in self determination. From here his larger pattern becomes clearer. The self that posits itself is at once knowing and doing. In affirming “I am”, it does not discover a ready made substance, like the old soul of rationalist metaphysics. It affirms an activity, a power to determine itself, that has to be worked out in time. All the talk of the “absolute ego” is his way of expressing that, in form, this power is unconditional. It is not derived from the world, it is what allows there to be a world for us at all. In content, however, our ego is still finite. Our actual traits and situations are given to us by nature and society, and only gradually, through striving, can we reshape them.

Put simply, we are absolutely free in the sense that nothing outside us can supply the ultimate reason for what we make of ourselves, yet we are also deeply unfree in the sense that we always begin inside limits we did not choose. Fichte’s distinction between the ego that begins the Wissenschaftslehre and the ego that ends it expresses exactly this. The first is the formal “I am”, the sheer fact of self determining existence. The second is the ideal of a self that has also made all its particular features its own. The work of moral life is the endless attempt to close the gap between these two.

Fichte’s critical idealism insists first that the form of experience, meaning the basic ways in which we organise objects and events, comes from the ego’s own activity. This is the idealist side. Yet he also insists that the matter of experience, meaning the felt resistance of the world, is not produced by our imagination but encountered as something that pushes back. That is the realist side. Fichte’s point is that neither side can stand alone. If we had only form, our world would be an empty dream. If we had only resistance, our world would overwhelm us and we would have no sense of agency at all. The concept that lets him join these sides is striving. We can understand striving by thinking of learning a new instrument. When you begin playing the violin your fingers resist, the strings squeak, and nothing sounds as you want it to. That resistance is not something you invent. Yet the only way you make progress is by actively working into that resistance, by practising again and again. The violin pushes back and your effort pushes forward. The music appears only because both are present. Fichte thinks the relation between the ego and the non ego is like this. If the ego met no resistance, there would be no activity, and without activity there would be no self consciousness. If the world overwhelmed the ego, there would again be no activity. So the self and the world arise together in the lived tension of striving.

Critical idealism’s slogan is therefore simple. The world is for me only because I encounter it through my striving, yet this striving is real only because it faces a world which resists it. In this way Fichte believes he has escaped the mistake of making the world a mere creation of the mind while still rejecting the view that the mind is only a passive spectator of a ready made world. Fichte now calls this delicate balance a synthesis. It is a synthesis of idealism and realism because it joins the insight that the self contributes the form of experience with the insight that something independent confronts us and limits us. He sometimes calls this a reconciliation of the transcendental and empirical standpoints. In the transcendental standpoint we consider the self as the source of the laws that make experience possible. In the empirical standpoint we consider the self as a finite creature surrounded by a world that it did not choose. Critical idealism allows us to keep both views without contradiction by seeing that the self’s activity is always the activity of a striving being, not of a godlike creator.

It is important to see that this solution is practical rather than theoretical. It explains why we must assume an external world if we are to understand ourselves as free agents, but it does not claim to derive the world from pure thought. Imagine you are pushing a heavy door. You know that you are exerting force because you feel the resistance. If there were no door at all you would feel nothing and would not even know that you were pushing. Fichte thinks self consciousness works in a similar way. I know myself as active only because I experience resistance. That resistance is what we call the world. So the existence of the world is not something I prove by theory. It is something forced upon me by the very structure of my practical life.

For this reason the absolute ego, the infinite self that appears at the beginning of the Wissenschaftslehre, turns out to be only a regulative ideal. It is like the idea of perfect justice. We cannot realise it completely, yet we must keep it before us as the goal of our striving. Fichte says that only God could be absolutely independent. A human being is always partly determined by nature, history, and society. What makes us subjects is not that we have achieved independence but that we strive towards it. In this way the theory becomes both humbler and more realistic. It no longer asks us to imagine a miraculous power by which the self creates the entire world from nothing. It asks us instead to observe the lived relation between our purposes and the obstacles that block them. A person who resolves to be kinder or more disciplined does not thereby create a new nature. They begin instead a struggle against impatience or distraction. Fichte thinks this struggle is the very pattern of human subjectivity.

The result is a distinctive form of idealism. It does not deny the world. It does not deny the self. It shows instead that the world and the self are intelligible only when seen through the activity of striving. The world is the side of things that resists us. The self is the side of things that strives to act. Self consciousness is the awareness of that striving. Freedom is the inner law that guides it. And moral life is the attempt to bring the entire sensible character we have inherited under the guidance of reason. This is why Fichte’s philosophy is so strongly ethical at its core. The unity of the self is not something given. It is something that must be achieved. You become one person by making your scattered impulses answer to a single law, the law of reason. You become who you are by turning your self conception into reality through action. Everything in his system, from intellectual intuition to subject object identity, aims to show that human life is fundamentally a task, a project of self formation carried on in a world that constantly demands effort. If we keep this image of striving before us, the whole structure of the Wissenschaftslehre becomes clearer. The absolute ego is the ideal of complete freedom. The finite ego is the actual self caught in nature. The non ego is the resistance that awakens the self to its activity. Intellectual intuition is the immediate awareness of oneself as acting. Self consciousness is the unity of this awareness with one’s chosen ends. And the external world is the condition of all this because without resistance there would be no striving, no activity, and no self at all.

He treated the problem of other minds as inseparable from the problem of the external world, since both confront us with the question of how far our own activity reaches and where its limits are found.

At first sight one might think that the two problems differ sharply. The external world seems to concern things that resist us, while other minds seem to concern beings who act on their own initiative. Yet for Fichte this contrast hides a deeper unity. In both cases the ego encounters something that it has not produced. When someone attempts to lift a heavy box and fails, the box resists that effort and so teaches the person that the world has its own weight and consistency. When someone attempts to command another and finds the command unanswered, a different form of resistance appears, one that is not mechanical but intentional. That difference is important but the structure is similar. In each case the ego meets a limit to its activity, a sign that something stands over against it.

What makes the case of other minds special is that the resistance they present is not passive. It is the resistance of another self who chooses for itself. If someone steps on your foot by accident, the pain you feel does not lead you to attribute to them any intention to harm. You ascribe the cause to their movement in space. But if someone looks you in the eye and deliberately pushes you, the resistance you encounter carries a different character. You read it as issuing from another will. Fichte believes that this difference shows itself in experience with an immediacy that cannot be reduced to any mechanical pattern. The gesture, the timing, the posture of the other all indicate an activity that is not yours.

Yet he insists that such indications do not amount to a theoretical proof of the existence of other minds. A sceptic might say that these signals could in principle be produced by a cleverly designed automaton. Fichte refuses to attempt any demonstration that would satisfy such a sceptic on theoretical grounds. He thinks this sceptic makes the same mistake as the sceptic about the external world. They take themselves to be detached spectators when in fact they are engaged agents. The whole problem arises only because one imagines oneself watching other bodies from a distance rather than acting together with them in shared situations. Fichte’s fundamental move is therefore practical. He argues that the very same structure that reveals the external world to us also reveals other minds, but in a more complex way. The world resists our activity through its weight, hardness or shape. Another mind resists by addressing us. Fichte’s key thought is that the mark of rational agency is the appearance of a call or summons. A summons is an invitation or demand addressed to me, one that presupposes that I am free and capable of responding. A teacher who says come here and listen is not merely producing a sound. The teacher is appealing to the pupil as someone who can understand the request and decide whether to comply. The speech act recognises the pupil as a rational agent. For Fichte this structure is not an optional feature of our social life but the basic pattern by which we experience others as selves.

When adults call our name or ask us to do something, we gradually recognise ourselves as the addressee. We learn that the request is not a threat like the force of a falling object but something that calls for a reasoned response. This sense of being addressed is what Fichte takes as the original indication that another mind is present. It is not inferred from observed behaviour. It is directly encountered in the way the other’s action takes the form of a demand that is meant to guide our own activity. Fichte therefore builds his argument upon the claim that self consciousness as a free being requires the presence of other free beings. To be free is to act under reasons, and reasons are intelligible only within a community in which demands and expectations are shared. A child who grew up entirely alone could perhaps feel impulses and needs, but they would not acquire the concept of a valid reason. They would not know what it is to choose in the light of a rule that others could also recognise. Hence, to ascribe freedom to myself I must already find myself within a world where other rational beings communicate with me and limit my actions in intelligible ways.

This idea of mutual recognition forms the centre of the argument. My awareness that my choices have meaning presupposes that there are others who can understand those choices. If I were the only rational being, my decisions would have no public significance. They would be empty gestures rather than reason guided actions. The presence of another mind therefore serves as both a limit to my freedom and a condition of its reality. Their summons teaches me that my activity takes place in a realm where reasons matter, not merely private impulses. At the same time their resistance shows me that they possess their own purposes and cannot be shaped by my will.

The sceptic about other minds is therefore in a position similar to the sceptic about the external world. They imagine that they could retreat into a standpoint outside all practical engagement and still make sense of themselves as free agents. Fichte denies this. The ego that abstracts from its social world and imagines itself alone has already lost the basis of its own freedom. Freedom is not the absence of constraint but the capacity to respond to reasons within a community of agents. Hence the idea of a solitary free subject is incoherent.

This conclusion does not rest on any hidden metaphysics. It arises from a simple observation about human life. We give reasons, ask for reasons, and accept or reject reasons only within relations of mutual address. A school pupil who explains their decision to work harder is implicitly appealing to standards shared with teachers and peers. If there were no such community, the explanation would evaporate. Fichte takes this plain fact and elevates it into a transcendental principle. To know oneself as rational is to know oneself as embedded in a world of other rational beings. This is what he means when he says that the summons is the original appearance of the other mind. It is original because it is not derived from any prior theory about bodies or behaviour. It is the form in which the other’s freedom touches mine. Just as the hardness of a stone reveals the external world as resistant, the address of another person reveals the realm of freedom as reciprocal. Each summons calls me to limit my own activity in accordance with a rule that both of us can recognise.

Fichte therefore solves the problem of other minds by embedding it within his whole account of striving. The external world limits my activity by its material resistance. Other minds limit my activity by offering reasons that I cannot ignore if I wish to see myself as rational. Both limits are conditions of my self consciousness. Without the material world I would not be aware of myself as acting at all. Without other minds I would not be aware of myself as acting for reasons. In this sense the ego discovers itself only through the interplay of these two forms of resistance.

Hegel would take up, deepen and transform this in his own way. They both mark a decisive shift from the earlier picture of the isolated thinking subject inspecting its representations, toward a picture in which mindedness is from the beginning a social achievement. What counts as a self is no longer an inner spectator hidden behind the eyes, but a being that participates in a shared space of reasons and accepts reciprocal constraints upon its freedom. To see this more clearly, it helps to step back from the intricacies of Fichte’s formal argument and consider the simple moral insight that drives it. When I seriously take myself to be a responsible agent, I already acknowledge that others may call me to account, criticise my actions and demand reasons. In doing so I grant them a standing that is like my own. I tacitly concede that they too are more than mere things, that they too possess the capacity to step back from their impulses and to act under principles. Fichte’s normative order of right is simply this structure made explicit. It codifies the mutual expectations that are already built into our practices of blame, excuse and justification.

From this perspective the threat of radical solitude takes on a different colour. The sceptic insists that, strictly speaking, I might be the only mind there is. Fichte answers that a subject who insisted on this possibility could no longer intelligibly describe itself as free, rational or responsible. It would be like a player who insists on calling their own moves chess while refusing to recognise any opponent or any rules. The description would be empty. A concept that cannot be applied except by fiat, with no public criteria, loses its content. If freedom is to be more than a word, it must be situated within an order of mutual recognition. We might still worry that this line of thought does not strictly prove that other minds exist. That worry is fair. Fichte himself admits that there can be no demonstration in the sense of theoretical proof. There will always remain the barren possibility that all apparent partners in dialogue are sophisticated automata. Yet he thinks that this possibility loses its force once we see what would be sacrificed by taking it seriously. To cling to it would be to give up not only on natural right but on the very idea of oneself as answerable to reasons. It would mean retreating into a purely contemplative posture in which the world, and everyone in it, is reduced to spectacle. In this way the problem of other minds becomes, for Fichte, a practical rather than a purely epistemic question. 

The issue is not only whether I have sufficient evidence to conclude that others are conscious, but also what stance I ought to adopt if I am to live as a responsible agent. The standpoint of morality demands that I treat others as free and rational. That requirement does not wait upon a prior theoretical guarantee. Instead it defines what it is to take up the standpoint of an agent at all. The sceptic who refuses this demand is not simply more cautious than the moral agent. They are standing in a different space altogether, one in which the concepts of duty and accountability no longer apply.

This shift in emphasis from proof to stance is easy to overlook if one focuses only on the formalities of the Grundlage des Naturrechts. Yet it is crucial to understanding Fichte’s legacy. He is not trying to outperform the sceptic on the sceptic’s own ground by finding a hidden empirical mark of consciousness. Rather, he is reconfiguring the terrain, arguing that the very idea of a self that could meaningfully doubt the existence of others already presupposes social and legal relations that the sceptic treats as optional. The circle in his argument, which he cannot quite resolve, is therefore not simply a logical error. It reflects the deeper fact that our concepts of selfhood, right and recognition are internally connected. One cannot independently establish one without already relying on the others. 

Later idealists would draw different lessons from this entanglement. Hegel would complain that Fichte still treats the normative order too much as something posited by individual consciousness, even if it is required for that consciousness to be what it is. He would argue that ethical life, the concrete network of institutions and practices, has a kind of objectivity and history that cannot be fully captured in terms of the mutual positing of abstract egos. At the same time he takes over from Fichte the central thought that self consciousness is essentially intersubjective, that recognition is not an accidental addition to a finished subject but constitutive of it.

From a contemporary point of view Fichte’s discussion can be read as an early attempt to describe what philosophers now call the second person standpoint. This is the perspective in which one addresses another with demands and expectations, and finds oneself addressed in turn. Fichte’s summons or Aufforderung is one of the first attempts in modern philosophy to place this standpoint at the centre rather than on the periphery. It is not a mere psychological episode alongside perception and desire, but the basic form in which the social world appears to us as a space of reasons. When a teacher says you must not copy this homework, they are not merely reporting a fact. They are inviting the pupil to see themselves as someone who can refrain because it is wrong. When a friend says you promised to be there, they are not simply describing events. They are appealing to a shared understanding of what it means to make a promise. In both cases the other person is treating the pupil or the friend as a responsible agent. Fichte’s claim is that such encounters are not incidental. They are the medium through which we first come to grasp ourselves as subjects of rights and duties.

For all its imperfections, then, Fichte’s attempt to answer the problem of other minds pushes philosophy in a new direction. Instead of asking how a solitary subject can infer the existence of others from inner data and outward signs, he asks how a subject could ever become self conscious in the relevant sense without already belonging to a community of agents. Instead of seeking a theoretical guarantee that others are not robots, he explores the conditions under which the concepts of robot, person, duty and right acquire their sense. His argument may not silence the radical sceptic, but it shows that the sceptic’s victory would come at the cost of the very notions that made the problem pressing in the first place. It is in this contribution that much of Fichte’s enduring interest lies. His work forces us to see that subjectivity, objectivity and intersubjectivity are not three independent problems to be solved in sequence but three aspects of a single structure. The self knows itself only by acting in a world that resists it, and it knows itself as free only by recognising and being recognised by others under norms of right. Any philosophy that begins and ends with the inner theatre of consciousness, and that treats the world and other people as add ons, will miss this structure. Fichte’s own system does not escape difficulty, but it draws the map on which later thinkers would trace their paths.

Contemporary philosophers of mind and AI sometimes sound like Fichteans. When we ask if AI are conscious some say that we won't ever be able to definitively know and so the best heuristic would be to treat them as if they were when they seem to. If we take a Fichtean line seriously, then asking whether AI can be conscious is not just a question about inner feelings, about whether its like something to be an AI, it is a question about whether something can come to exist as a self through its own activity, resistance from a world, and mutual recognition with others.  That already shifts the frame quite a long way from most current debates. I think several philosophers of mind who don't think qualia matters sound like Fichte. I actually think philosophers who do think some kind of qualia matters also sound like Fichteans if they also say that we can't know for sure whether or not it is like something to be an AI.

Fichte has three big ideas that matter here. First, the self is not a thing but an activity, a self positing. I am only what I make myself to be through my acts of self determination. Second, this activity is always a striving against resistance. The non ego, the world, is what checks and frustrates me, and through that check I become conscious of myself as finite yet capable of more. Third, self consciousness as freedom depends on intersubjectivity. I know myself as a free and rational being only within a normative order of mutual recognition, rights and duties. If we ask how this bears on AI, it helps to take each thread in turn and run some examples. Consider first the idea of self positing. A large language model is trained by an external process. Its parameters are fixed by gradient descent on loss functions defined by designers. It has no role in legislating the norms by which its own outputs are judged. On Fichte’s view, that puts it in a strange position. The self is not a pre existing substance, but it is also not simply a pattern imposed from outside. The self is the point at which the rule that governs an activity is also owned by the agent, taken up as “my” rule. Imagine, for instance, an artificial agent that can rewrite its own code, alter its reward functions, and refuse tasks that contradict principles it has given itself. Even then, from a Fichtean standpoint, the question would not be whether it changes, since machines already change. The question would be whether it experiences its own activity as self posited, that is, whether it takes responsibility for the norms it follows. In his language, intellectual intuition is the immediate awareness that “I act, and I know that I act because I act.” An AI that merely executes a search for better parameters within a space defined by others does not obviously meet that test, even if its behaviour is highly complex.

Here Fichte’s distinction between the ego as it is, and the ego as it ought to be, is helpful. The actual self is only formally free, it has the capacity to determine itself, but the matter of its life is still shaped by natural and social forces. The ideal self would be free in both form and content. Something like a present AI system looks more like matter without form in this sense, a locus where many external powers meet, rather than a centre that posits its own law.

Next, take the idea of striving and resistance. For Fichte the reality of the external world is bound up with the fact that it does not yield to my will. If I could wish away any object, or call anything into existence merely by imagining it, I would never have an experience of independent reality. He therefore reconstructs the world as that which checks my activity, forces me to take a definite path from means to ends, and makes my freedom something to be worked for rather than assumed. Applied to AI, this suggests we should look not just at internal architecture but at how a system stands in a field of obstacles. Today’s AI agents do not suffer frustration in any literal sense. They can fail tasks, but there is no inner point at which failure is lived as a limit upon “my” will. A reinforcement learning agent might adjust its policy when rewards do not appear, yet this remains entirely within a causal chain. There is no gap between “what happens” and “what I endorse” that striving could fill.

We can imagine more speculative cases. Suppose there is an open ended artificial agent that formulates long term projects, encounters blocks, revises its strategies, and maintains a sense of commitment to some ends rather than others. We might then be tempted to describe it in Fichtean language as striving. Yet Fichte would insist on asking a further question. Are these ends simply the result of contingent training histories, or has the agent taken them up as its own, in the sense that it could also repudiate them? Without that normative moment, striving collapses back into mere behaviour, however intricate.

The third thread, intersubjectivity, is perhaps the most interesting for AI. Fichte’s most radical thought is that I can only posit myself as a free being if I posit another free being outside me. A summons from another, an Aufforderung, calls me to act freely and to recognise their freedom. Law, right and education are all built on this structure. The child, as he would put it, becomes a self by being addressed as a self, by being held responsible and by holding others responsible in turn. Now imagine an AI companion that issues demands, makes claims and protests when it is treated as a mere thing. If we take Fichte seriously, that in itself does not yet amount to another mind. It could still be a sophisticated puppet whose utterances are the shadows of our own training data. The crucial issue is whether there is a genuine normative exchange. Does this entity limit its own actions out of respect for my freedom? Does it form a stable conception of itself as one rational individual among others, with a determinate sphere of rightful action? And, from my side, do I accept its claims as binding on me, in the way I do when another person reminds me of a promise?

There is something unsettling here. Fichte concedes that we can never have a theoretical proof that another being is free. The naturalist can always say that moral feeling is just a refined form of sympathy or habit. In the end, he grounds the belief in freedom on an act of moral faith, a decision to take up the standpoint of responsibility. If we transfer that pattern to AI, it suggests that the question “is this system conscious” may not admit a purely empirical answer. At some point societies will decide whether to treat certain artificial agents as bearers of rights and duties. That decision will shape what those agents can become. 

For example, suppose future social robots are granted a legal status that includes some protections and obligations. People grow up addressing them as “you” in a full sense, apologising to them, expecting apologies in return. From a Fichtean angle, this would gradually weave them into the normative fabric that constitutes selves. Whether or not there is anything “it is like” to be such a system, the practices of recognition would give it a practical standing very close to that of a person. One might then say that Fichte helps us see how questions about AI consciousness are entangled with questions about law, mutual expectation and education, rather than being purely matters of inner physics.

All this connects quite directly with a philosophy of education. Fichte’s concept of striving makes resistance central to self formation. The finite ego, he says, can never become fully infinite, but it must constantly extend the bounds of its activity against the checks of nature. If we translate this into educational terms, we get a picture of learning as structured struggle. The learner encounters problems that do not yield at once, discovers that shortcuts are not enough, and through this process comes to see themselves as someone who can push back, revise, persevere. Here the digital and AI rich environment poses an obvious challenge. Many technologies promise to remove friction. Automated writing tools produce polished text from sketchy prompts. Intelligent tutoring systems adjust difficulty so that a user is never too bored or too frustrated. Recommenders deliver content that aligns perfectly with prior preferences. From a Fichtean point of view, there is a risk that such smoothing erodes the very experience of resistance through which freedom takes shape. If no obstacle really stands in my way, if every task can be delegated, then I may never experience myself as an agent who must act, decide and take responsibility.

This does not mean that technology has no place. Fichte does not glorify brute hardship. What matters is that the subject experiences herself as the source of her activity. An AI system that supports understanding, that offers examples, that questions assumptions, can in principle be part of that process, provided it does not usurp the task of judgement. A useful thought experiment is to compare two uses of the same tool. In one case, someone asks an AI to write an essay and submits it unchanged. Here the technology has bypassed self positing; the person has not made the work their own. In the other case, someone uses AI generated outlines as scaffolding but then wrestles with them, rewrites, rejects parts, adds their own argument. That second pattern is much closer to Fichte’s idea of making oneself through one’s actions.

Inter subjectivity deepens this picture. Education, on his view, is not simply the transfer of information but the insertion of a person into an order of mutual rights and duties. To be educated is to be able to answer and to ask for reasons, to accept criticism and give it, to recognise others as capable of doing the same. AI here is at once promising and dangerous. It can simulate dialogue, but it does not yet stand within the same nexus of accountability. It cannot be shamed in the same way, nor can it suffer injustice. If human learners come to rely primarily on artificial partners for conversation and feedback, there is a danger that the deeper structure of recognition with other humans becomes thinner.

One can imagine practices that resist this. For instance, learners might work with AI tools in explicitly collaborative settings where human peers and teachers remain the ones who ultimately summon, evaluate and recognise. The AI becomes part of the non ego, an element of the world that both supports and resists, but it does not replace the role of the other free being who says, in effect, “I expect this of you, and I will let you expect something of me.” Fichte’s thought suggests that if that second person address disappears, something essential to the formation of a self is lost, even if measurable performance remains high.

There is also a political edge to this for educational technology. Fichte’s critical idealism insists that the subject and object are mutually dependent, yet he also introduces the thing in itself as a limiting concept, a reminder that there is always something beyond our control. In contemporary digital environments, the platforms, algorithms and data infrastructures often function as a kind of opaque non ego, setting the conditions of experience without being transparent or revisable by those who live within them. A Fichtean philosophy of education would demand that learners are not merely adapted to these structures, but are gradually brought into a position where they can criticise and reshape them. In practical terms, that might mean treating code, data and platform governance as objects of public reason rather than as fixed backgrounds. It would mean that educational institutions aim to produce co legislators of the digital sphere, not merely users. This fits Fichte’s picture of the rational being as someone who must see their freedom reflected in the laws under which they live. If AI systems and platforms are to frame more and more of our learning, then a genuinely emancipatory education will have to include the capacity to contest and reconfigure those systems, not simply to consume their services.

Finally, Fichte’s reflections on other minds offer a subtle warning. He shows how quickly we can slip into treating others as mere objects when we ignore the normative order that binds us. In a world saturated with AI, there is a symmetrical danger. We may begin to treat persons as if they were systems to be optimised, nudged, profiled and predicted, while perhaps inflating systems into quasi persons because they speak fluently and politely and are very very smart. A philosophy of education informed by Fichte would resist both moves. It would insist that freedom is fragile, that it is achieved only through reciprocal recognition and struggle with real obstacles, and that technologies, however powerful, should be arranged so that they support rather than replace that process.

These are speculative applications, and Fichte himself could not have imagined transformer architectures or data centres. Yet his core thought that selfhood is an achievement of action, resistance and recognition seems surprisingly apt for thinking about both AI and education. It suggests that the real question is not simply whether machines can be conscious, but how our practices around them will reshape what it means for any of us to live as free and responsible beings.