Abstract
Fichte’s philosophy of religion is widely recognized for its distinctiveness. In this chapter, I examine some of the core commitments that comprise it. First, I reconstruct Fichte’s arguments for the claim that God is ultimately incomprehensible (unbegreiflich) for finite human beings, drawing primarily on writings from his “Jena” period. Fichte’s views on the nature of understanding and of concepts, alongside other important positions, motivate his insistence on God’s incomprehensibility. Second, I show how Fichte develops the thought that moral action in a social context is the arena in which God can be represented or “symbolized,” both through the collective endeavor to understand the ultimate “supersensible something” and through the formation of a free community of individuals who together comprise the “image of God.”
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- 1.
The resulting “atheism controversy,” while personally and professionally disastrous for Fichte, was still an intellectual watershed for the era. A vast literature has, with justice, developed about the episode, including excellent modern editions of all of Fichte’s contributions. However, some of the ephemera, as well as a few more substantive contributions (e.g., from J. A. Eberhard), have yet to be organized or edited. Many of the central texts are available in English: see AD.
- 2.
In the German-speaking milieu in particular, the Reformation and the long turmoil of the Thirty Years’ War had sparked a movement toward “confessionalization” (especially but not exclusively among Protestants), in which faith was defined by adherence to a precise list of articles on the hot-button topics of the day, such as justification by faith or the nature of the Eucharist. Despite the resistance of the Pietist movement, by the late eighteenth century this process had long since been completed, with compulsory attendance at religious services and public confession of faith monitored by the local consistory. Fichte’s declaration about the “the only possible confession of faith” being simply “joyfully and innocently to accomplish whatever duty commands in every circumstance, without doubting and without pettifogging over the consequences” (IWL 150 [GA I/5:354]) needs to be understood against this background, which is crucial for seeing why people thought Fichte an atheist.
- 3.
See my “Fichte’s Transcendental Theology,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 92, no. 1 (2010): 68–88.
- 4.
Besides the two editions of the Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, Fichte also discusses the interpretive principles he applies to the historical “documents” of Christianity (i.e., the Bible), principles that are crucial to this reconstructive effort, inThe Way towards the Blessed Life (1806). Other works, largely categorized as “popular” by Fichte himself, such as TheVocation of Man (1800) and theAddresses to the German Nation (1808), describe rationalfaith (Glaube) variously, from the personal, educational, and institutional points of view respectively.
- 5.
Fichte occasionally asserts that this view of God is a central element of the entire Wissenschaftslehre. For instance, in the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo, he writes:
It is a fundamental principle of the Wissenschaftslehre that all being is something produced or created and that the intelligible foundation that underlies being is not any sort of being, but is pure activity. The Deity is therefore the same sort of pure activity as the intellect except that the Deity is something that cannot be comprehended. (NM 436 [GA IV/2: 240])
In a Berlin lecture of winter 1805, Fichte asserts that this claim is precisely what aligns his thought with “genuine Christianity and with every person who understands himself” (GA II/7:378).
- 6.
For valuable discussions of the Wolffian or rationalist strand in German theology, see Stephan Lorenz, “Theologischer Wolffianismus. Das Beispiel Johann Gustav Reinbeck,” in Christian Wolff und die Europäische Aufklärung. Akten des 1. Internationlaen Christian-Wolff-Kongresses, Halle (Saale), 4.–8. April 2004, 5 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2007) and the earlier account in Emmanuel Hirsch, Geschichte der neuern evangelischen Theologie, im Zusammenhang mit den allgemeinen Bewegungen des europäischen Denkens, vol. 2. (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1964). On the neologians especially, the classic study is Karl Aner, Die Theologie der Lessingzeit (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1964). The impact on Fichte of the key players in the theology of this era is very difficult to overestimate. To take just two examples, Lessing’s justly famous account of the evolution of religion as the “education of the human race” (Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts) is echoed in Fichte’s account of the evolution of thecreed in both the 1798 and 1812 versions of the theory of ethics (Sittenlehre), while the influential neologian Spalding’s wildly popular reflections on the “vocation of humanity” were essential instigators for Fichte. On this latter influence in particular, see George di Giovanni, Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind 1774–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- 7.
The only full length study of this critical period in Fichte’s intellectual development remains Rainer Preul, Reflexion und Gefühl: Die Theologie Fichtes in seiner vorkantischer Zeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969).
- 8.
For a discussion of the reception of Spinoza in Saxon universities during the 1780s and early 1790s and its connection with Fichte, see Benjamin D. Crowe, “‘Theismus des Gefühls’: Heydenreich, Fichte, and the Transcendental Philosophy of Religion,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 4 (2009): 569–92. Much more should be known about the intellectual milieu in Leipzig around the time of Fichte’s residence there, which included correspondents of Kant such as F. G. Born and K. A. Caesar, Schiller’s associate Körner, and the professor of medicine and physiology, Ernst Platner.
- 9.
This critical project is evidently behind some of Fichte’s comments oncreeds or confessions of faith in the Theory of Ethics of 1798:
What do these enveloping images [einkleidenden Bilder] have to say? Do they determine what is supersensible in a universally valid manner? By no means, for why would there then be any need for people to combine in a church, the end of which is none other than the further determination of what is supersensible? … It can therefore be presumed that these costumes [Einkleidungen] are merely the manner in which a community expresses for itself and for the time being the proposition, ‘there is something supersensible.’ (SE 231 [GA I/5:219])
I say more about Fichte’s account of these “images” below.
- 10.
There is a long history in philosophy of employing the Idea of God in certain kinds of arguments, including those involving counterfactual states of affairs and what we might think of as thought experiments. See Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). The proscription of certain theses associated with Aristotle (1277) actually made new kinds of moves available to philosophers. Important moments in early modern metaphysics (Descartes on atomism, say, or Leibniz’s mill) reflect this medieval legacy. Kant and Fichte inherit the rationalist approach in this respect as well. In the case of Kant, the role that the idea of a “holy will” plays in his account of moral obligation exemplifies this kind of treatment. For a perspicuous recent discussion, see Robert Stern, Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- 11.
Kant makes a similar point inReligion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, describing the core Christian notion of God the Father’s giving up of His Son for the sake of human redemption. “We have here (as means of elucidation) a schematism of analogy, with which we cannot dispense. To transform it, however, into a schematism of object-determination (as means for expanding our cognition) constitutesanthropomorphism, and from the moral point of view (in religion) this has most injurious consequences” (Rel 6:63–66). On Kant’s account, to schematize an idea is “to render a concept comprehensible through analogy with something of the senses.” Naturally, we cannot attribute what pertains to the sensible to the supersensible—therefore, it does not follow from the necessity of the schema that it captures an actual predicate of the object. Rather, to “render comprehensible” here means “to support it with an example” (Rel 6:97–98). Thus, “between the relationship of a schema to its concept and the relationship of this very schema of the concept to the thing itself there is no analogy, but a formidable leap (metabasis eis allo genos) which leads straight into anthropomorphism” (Rel 6:65n).
- 12.
G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 41.
- 13.
In his account of “physico-theology” in § 85, Kant asserts that reason “cannot determine this concept [of an intentionally acting cause of the world] any further in either a theoretical or a practical respect; and its attempt does not fulfill its aim of establishing a theology” (CJ 5:437).
- 14.
To take one relevant example of Fichte’s lifelong interest in Kant’s aesthetics, Fichte freely cites the “Third Critique” and discusses poetic representations of moral ideas in his 1812 lectures on ethics (LTE 104; 120 [StA 344; 355–56]).
- 15.
Fichte makes much the same point in a stronger way further on in the same discussion: “Yet even if my propositions are actually in accord with universal reason and hence are universally valid, the particular presentation of any proposition still always remains something individual; this clothing for the proposition is the best available, above all for me” (SE 235 [GA I/5:222]). This individuality, reflecting as it does wholly contingent features of a person’s education, personality, and the like, is what is gradually overcome in the infinite process of reciprocal communication.
- 16.
Indeed, in remarks that could just as well have been written by Fichte, Kant at one point writes: “This idea of the supersensible [nature in itself], however, which of course we cannot further determine, so that we cannot cognize nature as a presentation of it but can only think it, is awakened in us by means of an object the aesthetic judging of which stretches imagination to its limit” (CJ 5:268).
- 17.
In a discussion of the duties of the clergy later in the System of Ethics, Fichte describes their primary function as creating “public moral representations [Vorstellungen]” (perhaps sermons, public rites, or both) in order to “animate and strengthen” our inchoate “sense” of our own moral vocation (SE 331 [GA I/5:305]).
- 18.
This is not to say that Fichte aims to aestheticize morality completely. He is quite critical of his erstwhile comrades-in-arms among the early German Romantics for what he sees as their substitution of unbridled imagination (Phantasie) for the clarity of the concept (e.g., in a lecture on the Wissenschaftslehre from the winter of 1804 [GA II/7:82]).
- 19.
A later summary passage is illuminating in this connection: “Supersensible knowledge expresses itself in a twofold manner: either in general [überhaupt], merely that there is something supersensible, without any further determination [Bestimmung]; or in some mode of determination, shaped in a certain way” (StA 29). The first is largely the situation as Fichte leaves it at the end of his discussions of God’s incomprehensibility. The second, on the other hand, represents for Fichte the only intelligible way to give shape to the idea of the supersensible.
- 20.
This remark should be connected with a later comment, to the effect that God’s creation of the world is not finished or perfected, “but rather the creative process [das Erschaffen] continually progresses, and [God] remains creative, though the immediate object of His creation is not an inert and stationary physical world [Körperwelt], but rather a free life that eternally lives on its own basis [aus sich selbst lebende Leben]” (StA 53).
- 21.
Fichte later provides a succinct formulation of the idea behind his “moral phenomenology”: “As is the I that you see, and that you alone see, so is the concept that you do not see…” (LTE 67 [StA 319]).
- 22.
Fichte describes the process of reciprocal communication that this requires in the twenty-second lecture of the series (LTE 119–23 [StA 354–58]).
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Crowe, B.D. (2019). Giving Shape to the Shapeless: Divine Incomprehensibility, Moral Knowledge, and Symbolic Representation. In: Hoeltzel, S. (eds) The Palgrave Fichte Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26508-3_18
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