[Literature] Johann Gottlieb Fichte: The Vocation of the Scholar #7/24

The highest impulse in man is, according to our last lecture, the impulse towards Identity, towards perfect harmony with himself; and, in order that he may be in constant harmony with himself, towards the harmony of all external things with his necessary ideas of them. There must not merely be nothing contradictoryto his ideas, so that the existence or non-existence of an external representative of these ideas might be a matter of indifference to him, but there must actually be something correspondingto his ideas. Every idea which exists in the Ego must have a representative, an antitype, in the Non-Ego:—so is his impulse determined.

There is in man the idea not only of Reason, but also of reasonable acts and thoughts, and his nature demands the realization of this idea not only within himself but also without himself. It is thus one of his wants that there should be around him reasonable beings like himself.

He cannot create such beings; but he lays the idea of them at the foundation of his observation of the Non-Ego, and expects to find something there corresponding to it. The first mark of rationality which presents itself is of a merely negative character, efficiency founded on ideas, activity towards an end. Whatever bears the marks of design may have a reasonable author; that to which the notion of design cannot be applied has certainly no reasonable author. But this characteristic is ambiguous; the agreement of many things in one end is the mark of design, but there are many kinds of agreement which may be explained by mere natural laws, if not by mechanical, then by organic laws; hence we still require a distinctive mark whereby we may confidently infer from a particular phenomenon the existence of a reasonable cause. Nature proceeds, even in the fulfilment of her designs, by necessary laws;—Reason always proceeds with freedom. Hence the agreement of many things in one end, freely fulfilled, is the sure and infallible characteristic of rationality as manifested in its results. We now inquire, How can we distinguish a phenomenon in our experience produced by necessity, from a phenomenon produced by freedom?

I can by no means be immediately conscious of a freedom which exists out of myself, I cannot even be conscious of a freedom which exists within myself, that is, of my own freedom; for essential freedom is the first condition of consciousness, and hence cannot lie within its sphere of observation. But I may be conscious of this, that I am not conscious of any other cause for a particular determination of my empirical Ego through my will, than this will itself; and this non-consciousness of constraining cause may be called a consciousness of freedom, if this be clearly understood beforehand; and we shall call it so here. In this sense then, man may be conscious of his own free activity.

If through our own free activity, of which we are conscious in the sense above indicated, the character of the activity apparent in the phenomena which experience presents to us is so changed that this activity is no longer to be explained according to the law by which we formerly judged it, but according to that on which we have based our own free action, and which is quite opposed to the former; then we cannot explain this altered view of the activity apparent in experience otherwise than by the supposition that the cause to which we refer it is likewise reasonable and free. Hence arises,—to use the Kantian terminology,—a free reciprocal activity founded on ideas,—a community pervaded by design;—and it is this which I call Society. The idea of Society is thus sufficiently defined.

It is one of the fundamental impulses of man to feel that he must assume the existence around him of reasonable beings like himself; and he can only assume their existence under the condition of entering into Society with them, according to the meaning of that word as above explained. The social impulse thus belongs to the fundamental impulses of man. It is man’s vocation to live in Society—he mustlive in Society;—he is no complete man, but contradicts his own being, if he live in a state of isolation.

You see how important it is not to confound the abstract idea of Society with that particular empirically-conditioned form of Society which we call the State. Political Society is not a part of the absolute purpose of human life (whatever a great man may have said to the contrary); but it is, under certain conditions, a possible means towards the formation of a perfect Society.