Forgotten Roots of the Left:
Fichte’s Moral & Political Philosophy, Part I

J. G. Fichte

6,359 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

1. “I am what I freely make myself to be”

This is the sixth essay I have written for Counter-Currents on the German idealist J. G. Fichte (see the introductory essay here), and it is effectively a continuation of my series on “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics.” However, the reader need not be familiar with any of the earlier entries in order to understand this one.

Fichte is quite possibly the most difficult of all the German philosophers, and in my first five essays I struggled to explain the complexities of his major work, the so-called Wissenschaftslehre (Science or Doctrine of Knowledge). All the while, I tantalized the reader with the claim that in Fichte we find one of the major progenitors of the political Left — even with respect to such currently fashionable Leftist fixations as “gender fluidity,” “social construction” of race and gender, and radical egalitarian claims about human perfectibility. In the present essay, I shall make good on these claims.

In previous installments, I have argued that Fichte offers us a “pragmatic idealism.” He does not claim, as is often asserted, that the world is the creation of the ego, or, as he calls it, the “I” (Ich). Rather, he claims that it ought to be. Fichte argues that it is the vocation of mankind to re-create nature in accordance with human aspirations and ideals. This is an infinite task, and its ever-receding endpoint is a state in which all otherness is finally cancelled. All we would be aware of is ourselves — because the world that confronts us would be entirely the product of our thought and labor. In some of my other essays on Fichte, I have already touched very briefly on his ethics. The very idea that our human task is to transform nature not into just anything we please, but into “what ought to be” is itself an ethical claim.

Now, however, we must go into more detail. As a way of entering into Fichte’s moral philosophy, as presented in his work The System of Ethics (1798), let us simply raise the question of how we may define the aforementioned “I.” He insists that this is the fundamental principle of his philosophy, and we may understand it as basically the same thing as “the self.” But what is that? What am I? Here we immediately run into a problem, for Fichte holds that the “I” is indefinable — not because it is some kind of mystical absolute, but because it must define itself. Fichte writes in The Science of Ethics:

Properly speaking, who am I? I.e., what kind of individual am I? and what is the reason for my being who I am? To this question, I respond as follows: from the moment I become conscious, I am what I freely make myself to be, and this is who I am because this is what I make of myself.[1]

Fichte’s other statements on the matter are equally clear and explicit. For example, he says that “the I is only what it posits itself to be.”[2] Elsewhere, he uses “intellect” in place of the “I” and states that “the intellect, as such, is absolutely self-determining, nothing but pure activity.”[3] This is not an idea without precedent in the history of philosophy. We could argue, for example, that we find the roots of these claims in Aristotle’s argument in De Anima that nous (intellect) can know all things because it itself is nothing (i.e., it has no form). Philosophers from Aristotle to Kant have recognized that there is something very special about human subjectivity, which has led them to argue that it is like nothing in nature. The reason for this, quite simply, is that subjectivity is that to which all of nature is (potentially) manifest; but subjectivity itself does not manifest as a thing in nature. Subjectivity is not “the brain” or “in the brain,” because the brain is yet another object in nature that manifests to subjectivity. The unique “openness” or receptivity to presence that constitutes subjectivity does not show up as a physical thing in nature with dimensions, coloration, weight, etc.

This is why Kant insisted that subjectivity could not be understood by the natural sciences; it could not, in other words, be studied “from the outside” but only “from the inside.” Fichte follows him in this (as will Husserl and Heidegger), condemning the “naturalistic” treatment of subjectivity as what he calls “dogmatism.” But if the “I” is not an object in nature, then it cannot be determined to be what it is by natural forces or influences. Its nature is to be radically free of such things — which means that it is undetermined. I remember once hearing a professor respond to this with shocked incredulity: “You mean its nature is to have no nature?” Yes, that is precisely what Fichte means.

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This conception of self-identity should not seem that strange and unfamiliar to my readers –because it is all around us in the modern world. We are continually being told that we can be “anything we want to be.” Outside of the science departments — where the truth is now only whispered — the prevailing dogma is that human beings are untouched by nature. Thus, race and sex are declared to be mere states of mind. All that matters is subjective conviction: If a 55-year-old man “identifies” as a nine-year-old black girl, then he is precisely that and must be treated accordingly.

If Fichte could be summoned in a time machine, he would doubtless be appalled by this. Nevertheless, the Kantian-Fichtean spirit is still very much in evidence in those Leftists who insist that biological determination must be rejected on principle, regardless of how much evidence supports it, since the very idea is an affront to human dignity. Hence the antipathy of academic Leftists to the entire field of sociobiology. What is important to understand is that while Fichte is most definitely one of the precursors to this modern madness, a convincing argument can be made that the entire metaphysical tradition from Aristotle onwards prepares the ground for it. (This is where my argument in the “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics” series has been headed.)

The first step in Fichte’s ethics is, in fact, simply the affirmation of the radical freedom of our “I” and all that this implies: self-determination, self-sufficiency, and independence. In affirming this, the “I” in effect dictates a law to itself, the law of what Fichte calls “absolute self-sufficiency.”[4] It is as if the “I” says to itself, “I know that my true nature is to be absolutely free and self-sufficient; I therefore will that I shall always act in such a way as to affirm that self-sufficiency, and never to undermine it.” Thus, Fichte writes that “[t]he principle of morality is the necessary thought of the intellect that it ought to determine its freedom [i.e., choose determinate or specific actions] in accordance with the concept of self-sufficiency, absolutely and without exception.”[5]

But how do we apply this principle to daily life, to actual ethical choices? Fichte answers as follows: “An action is suitable to the pure drive [for absolute independence] if it is also directed toward absolute independence, i.e., it if lies in a series [of actions], through the continuation of which the I would have to become independent.”[6] Put more simply, Fichte is saying that an action is morally permissible if it advances the self-sufficiency (i.e., the freedom) of the “I,” or if it is part of a series of actions that ultimately advances it. We can understand Fichte’s ethical perspective along the lines of Aristotle’s eudaimonism. Fichte most certainly does not claim that “happiness” is the end of life (far from it), but he is not unlike Aristotle in arguing that our ethical end is to become who we are. Thus, the Fichtean moral imperative essentially involves affirming, cultivating, and preserving the radical freedom of the “I.”

Further, just as in Aristotle, the good man is one who orders his life in such a way that all his actions aim, ultimately, at his natural end (in Fichte’s case, freedom) — and really do advance him toward that end. It is also genuinely fascinating that for Fichte, the telos or end of human ethical striving is to become, in effect, the incarnation of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover: an absolutely free, undetermined, and self-sufficient being. In this democratization of Aristotelian theology, in which all of us get to become the Unmoved Mover, the ultimate end is the remaking of nature into an image of ourselves — though Fichte is careful to say that this an infinite task. This goal, were it to be achieved, would be the realization in time of the Unmoved Mover’s actus aeternus of self-knowing thought — since, as I have already mentioned, the complete transformation of nature would entail our being confronted not with an other, but only with the products of our own minds.

But let us allow Fichte to speak for himself:

The final end of the moral law is absolute independence and self-sufficiency, not merely with respect to our will, for the latter is always independent, but also with respect to our entire being. This goal is unachievable, but there is still a constant and uninterrupted process of approximation to this goal. Accordingly, there must be a constant uninterrupted series of actions by means of which one draws nearer and nearer to this goal, a series that starts from the initial standpoint occupied by each person.[7]

If the final end of the moral law is freedom, then it looks as if we are commanded to pursue freedom purely for its own sake. Indeed, Fichte says precisely this: “The ethical drive demands freedom — for the sake of freedom.”[8] The pursuit of freedom for its own sake is precisely what Fichte means by “duty” (Pflicht), and we can know our duty in specific situations by consulting conscience (Gewissen): “Always act in accordance with your best conviction concerning your duty, or, act according to your conscience.”[9] He defines conscience as “the immediate consciousness of that without which there is no consciousness whatsoever: the consciousness of our higher nature and of our absolute freedom.”[10] In characterizing conscience as an “immediate consciousness,” he means that it is not a mediated representation of something outside ourselves. Instead, it is a form of knowing that is direct and instantaneous: Through conscience I simply know with full conviction that something is or is not compatible with my “higher nature” as an absolutely free being. Elsewhere, he characterizes it as a “sheer feeling.”[11]

It may seem strange to see Fichte appealing to something as “subjective” as conscience — but he does not see it as subjective. If conscience were subjective, then it would be fallible: Sometimes it would be right, and other times wrong. Surprisingly, Fichte rejects this possibility. He writes, “Conscience never errs and cannot err, for it is the immediate consciousness of our pure, original I, over and above which there is no other kind of consciousness; it cannot be examined nor corrected by any other kind of consciousness.”[12] To see why he thinks this, consider some instance in which your conscience has spoken to you — perhaps, for example, you felt your conscience troubling you when you were rude or abrupt to another person. In such a case, you may try to dismiss what your conscience tells you, but you will immediately have the sense that you are evading or lying to yourself, and that conscience needs to be heeded.

Conscience may continue to trouble you until you have done something to make amends — and even potentially beyond that. This is what Fichte is getting at when he claims that there is no higher type of consciousness above and beyond conscience that might overrule it. Like it or not, conscience is felt by us to be the final authority. And no external authority may overrule conscience, either — again, so far as our own deeply-felt conviction is concerned. Fichte writes,

No command, no dictum is unconditionally binding because it is stated in one place or another or because it is uttered by a certain person — even if it is allegedly a divine dictum or command. Anything that does not have its origin in faith [Glaube], in confirmation by our own conscience, is an absolute sin.[13]

Thus, no authority on earth or in heaven may overrule the individual conscience.

When Fichte refers to “faith” in the above quotation, he does not mean religious faith. The German Glaube can mean faith in the religious sense, but it also simply means “belief.” Conscience is a type of faith because it is a belief that carries immediate conviction, though it is not accompanied by any “proof.” This emphasis upon the faith of the individual — upon the individual’s internal state as a guide to truth — must call to mind Lutheranism. Indeed, there is an extremely strong influence of Lutheran moralism on Fichte, as there was on Kant. We will have occasion to reflect on this a little later, but for now we shall see one instance of this in Fichte’s treatment of the body and of physical pleasure. And here we shall encounter concrete examples of how Fichte thinks we should apply consciousness of our duty to the conduct of our lives.

2. “I am supposed to determine myself utterly independently of the impetus of nature”

Unsurprisingly, Fichte approaches the topic of the body through an argument deducing why the “I” should be embodied at all. It is not enough for him, in other words, that we do have a body; he must show, conceptually, why the having of a body is necessary for the “I” to be an “I.” The argument is actually very simple: Without a physical presence in the world, the “I” could not actualize its freedom. It is only by being an embodied individual present in some determinate location, within some determinate time that the “I” can act upon nature. (This argument is put forward in Fichte’s 1796-97 work Foundations of Natural Right.) Fichte here seems to anticipate Heidegger’s conception of Dasein, or “there being”: the idea that man is a being situated in a locality and in historical time. (Though Fichte would not follow Heidegger in embracing historicism.)

Since the possession of a body is a necessary condition for realizing our freedom in the world, we have the duty to preserve the body and to care for it — indeed to seek its “maximal perfection,” as he says. Now, if you think this is a “body affirming” philosophy that might allow you to rationally justify all that time you spend in the gym, you are in for a major letdown. For Fichte tells us, in some of his clearest prose, that

I must preserve and cultivate my body purely as an instrument of moral acting, but not as an end unto itself. The sole end of all my care for my body absolutely ought to be and must be to transform this body into a suitable instrument of morality and to preserve it as such.[14]

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This is a logical implication of his position that the body is a necessary condition of the realization of the freedom of the “I”: It follows from this that only such uses of the body that advance that freedom can be morally justified. Thus, cultivating bodily beauty merely for its own sake is morally insupportable. Further, surrendering oneself to sensual pleasure is forbidden, for it involves ceding control of oneself to something other than the free, rational “I.”

Lest there be any misunderstanding about this, Fichte states that “our body absolutely may not be treated as a final end; i.e., it absolutely may not become an object of enjoyment for enjoyment’s sake.”[15] However, Fichte opposes “mortification of the flesh,” as practiced both by Catholics and Protestants, because it weakens the body and thus makes it a less effective instrument for the expression of the moral will. Therefore, we may eat and drink our fill — but only if this is done so as to preserve the body in its role as moral instrument. Fichte writes that “every enjoyment that cannot be related, with sincere conviction, to our efforts to cultivate our body in a suitable manner [in order to make it an instrument of freedom] is impermissible and contrary to the law.”[16] And he quotes Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians in order to convey the spirit he asks us to adopt: “Eat and drink in order to honor God” (10:31).

Fichte thus does not call upon us to completely suppress natural drives — such as those for food, drink, or sex. Rather, these are to be the objects of rational cultivation (Bildung): We must learn the proper control of desires and emotions in certain contexts — to delay gratification, for example, or to learn to “count to ten” before reacting. Notoriously, however, some individuals — and some groups — are better able to control desires and emotions than others. This essentially means that some are more human than others, for the capacity to place desires under the control of the will is arguably our defining trait. It is a point that is by no means original to Fichte: This capacity is universally understood to be the basis of civilization itself. If we truly did “get in touch with our feelings” and let it all hang out, we would quickly descend into brutality.

Fichte’s analysis of this human capability is interesting and original, however. His first step in understanding it essentially consists in affirming the capacity of human subjectivity to stand opposed to all else: As noted earlier, subjectivity is that to which all of nature is (potentially) manifest; but subjectivity itself does not manifest as a thing in nature. (This is precisely the concept of the “detached ‘I’” that I attacked years ago in an essay titled “Are We Free?”) Fichte writes that “the reflecting subject stands higher than what it reflects upon; the former rises above and includes within itself the latter.”[17] In other words, the reflecting subject, in a certain sense, encompasses what it reflects upon. This is why we speak of gaining knowledge of something as “comprehending” it (“comprehension” can also mean “inclusion”). To know something is to cancel its otherness and to absorb it within our understanding (which is also a term pregnant with significance).

The relation of the “I” to our desires and drives is just such a comprehension, in which the alienness of nature within me is cancelled by the reflecting subject which is “not nature and stands above all nature.”[18] The “final end” of this process of bringing our animal nature under the dominion of the “I” is “absolute freedom, absolute independence from all nature — an infinite end, which can never [fully] be achieved.”[19] Again, Fichte does not differ from other philosophers in holding that the rational self must tame desire (see, for example, the third book of The Republic), but he does differ from others in the sheer fanaticism of his insistence upon the point. He writes, for example,

I am supposed to determine myself utterly independently of the impetus of nature. In this manner I am not only separated from nature, but I am also elevated above it; I am not only not a member of the series of nature, but I can also self-actively intervene in this series. — When I see the power of nature beneath me, it becomes something that I do not respect. . . . If I succumb and become part of what I cannot respect, then I cannot respect myself from the higher point of view. In relation to the propensity that pulls me down into the series of natural causality, therefore, the [pure] drive [for absolute self-determination] manifests itself as a drive that fills me with respect, summons my self-respect, and determines my dignity as something elevated above all nature. The pure drive does not aim at enjoyment of any kind, but instead at disdain for all enjoyment. It renders enjoyment contemptible as such.[20]

If it seems to you that Fichte doesn’t want you to have any fun — indeed, to be constantly vigilant lest you come dangerously close to having fun — you would be correct. He tells us that “I ought never to act without having measured my action by this concept [of duty]. — It follows that there are no indifferent actions.”^[21] And never means never. If there are no “indifferent actions,” it follows that we may not coast through life as we usually do, thinking that only certain situations require us to consult our duty, because most are “morally neutral.” No, we are commanded to be aware of our duty in every step we take. “[E]xercise and attentiveness,” he writes, “keeping watch over ourselves: these must be constantly continued; and without continued effort no one is secured in his morality for even a single second. No human being . . . is ever confirmed in the good.”[22]

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It’s not accidental that Fichte comes across like the most fanatical and straitlaced of Protestant preachers. The claim he has just made is the dark underside of the Protestant emphasis upon faith and individual conviction. If what matters above all else is my soul’s internal state, then indeed, I must be constantly vigilant lest I give way, even just a little bit, to impure thoughts or desires — for then all is potentially lost. There is no sacrament of confession and penance for the Protestant that would ease his burden, because all external authority is rejected. It’s all on you, in other words. As if anticipating that his readers might find his ethics uncongenial, Fichte writes at one point, “A person to whom such an ethics appears austere and painful is beyond help, for there is no other ethics.”[23] It is worthwhile recalling Max Weber’s characterization of Protestantism, for it reads like a summation of Fichte’s ethics:

This religion demanded of the believer, not celibacy, as in the case of the monk, but the avoidance of all erotic pleasure, not poverty, but the elimination of all idle and exploitative enjoyment of unearned wealth and income, and the avoidance of all feudalistic, sensuous ostentation of wealth; not the ascetic death-in-life of the cloister, but an alert, rationally controlled patterning of life, and the avoidance of all surrender to the beauty of the world, to art, or to one’s own moods and emotions. The clear and uniform goal of this asceticism was the disciplining and methodical organization of the whole conduct of life.[24]

3. “Judged by the moral law, every human life possesses equal value”

Let us now briefly consider Fichte’s views on our moral obligations to others. While absolute freedom is, as you will have gathered, the central concept of Fichte’s philosophy, he argues that we nevertheless feel called upon to limit our freedom by the fact that others exist. In The Foundations of Natural Right, he refers to this call as “the summons” (Aufforderung). The sheer existence of the other issues, in effect, is a summons to me, a summons to recognize him as another being like myself. I feel bound to do so, and I understand that I cannot expect others to recognize my own claims about how I wish to be treated unless I recognize theirs.

How does Fichte tell us that we are to treat others? The answer should not surprise you:

[D]emonstrate just as much concern for the well-being of each of your neighbors as you do for your own well-being; love your neighbor as yourself. . . . I ought to be just as concerned about the preservation of others as of myself. . . . Judged by the moral law, every human life possesses equal value; as soon as any human being is endangered, all other human beings, no matter who they may be, no longer have the right to be safe until this person’s life has been saved. — The words of the late Duke Leopold are forthright, grand, and totally in line with the ethical disposition: “What is at stake here are human lives, so why should I count any more than you?”[25]

If all human lives are of equal value, you can imagine what Fichte has to say about “love of one’s own.” He is careful to note that if I am placed in a situation where I am obliged to aid others, and if some of those others are individuals for whom I have assumed a direct responsibility (e.g., wives and children), then I have a duty to help them first. However, he adds that “this preference [must not be] based on natural, pathognomic love or on any concern for my own happiness. All such motives are reprehensible.”[26] As the translators of The Science of Ethics note, the term “pathognomic love” (pathognomisch Lieb) “is the equivalent of the term, ‘pathological love,’ a term that is to be found in Kant and others. Both terms signify a form of love that is based on feeling rather than upon respect grounded in reason.”[27] Thus the love of one’s own based, as the evidence now seems to indicate, on genetic similarity has no moral import.

We have to be careful about how we understand this, however. Fichte’s ethics is essentially a radicalization of Kant’s. It would take us too far afield to discuss Fichte’s specific debts to Kant’s moral thought, but I will mention one key commonality: Like Kant, Fichte endorses the idea that actions are only moral if they flow from a conscious awareness of what the moral law dictates, not if they flow from mere inclination. Thus, to take one example, I have a moral obligation to feed my children, because they are dependent upon me. If, however, I feed them because I love them and not because I see that it is my duty to do so, then my actions are merely in accord with duty, but do not flow from duty. Since the result is that I actually do feed my children, my actions do not contradict morality (and are therefore not immoral), but neither are they moral.

Kant and Fichte are not saying that “pathognomic love” is immoral; but they are saying that love of one’s own simply cannot be a consideration if our concern is with moral action. Fichte also makes very clear his own lack of connection to “his own.” Like one of today’s liberals, he devalues everything about himself that he has not chosen — which is exactly what we would expect in a philosopher of “absolute freedom.” He writes, “In ordinary life we make an important distinction between those aspects of ourselves that are part of our personality but are not present as a result of our freedom — e.g., birth, health, genius, etc. — and what we are as a result of freedom.” He then goes on to quote Ovid in the Metamorphoses: “Race and ancestors, and those things that we did not make ourselves, I scarcely consider to be our own.”[28] (A passage also quoted by Kant in his Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.)

Let us apply Fichte’s moral theory to a specific example: the “great replacement” of European peoples in their own countries by North African migrants. On Kantian-Fichtean grounds, it is impossible to oppose this phenomenon. As we have already seen, Fichte claims that “every human life possesses equal value.” A German, for example, can express a preference for helping his own children over others, since, as discussed above, he is directly responsible for his own children. But he cannot express a preference for helping Germans over migrants. According to Fichte’s manner of thinking, he is no more responsible for Germans in general than he is for any other people. All lives have an equal moral claim on him, and a preference for Germans is purely an expression of “pathognomic love,” and thus must be ruled out as irrational. Further, should the Germans fret about the various costs of admitting migrants, this is not merely a non-moral consideration; it is positively immoral — because the migrant’s lives are allegedly endangered and, remember, “as soon as any human being is endangered, all other human beings, no matter who they may be, no longer have the right to be safe until this person’s life has been saved.”

The above Fichtean analysis of the issue is identical to the position taken on immigration (or migration) by liberals in Europe and America. As an aside, I might add that one is tempted to attribute the German people’s inability to take their own side not just to post-war guilt, but to having been imprinted by Kantian philosophy, which did indeed exercise an enormous influence on German culture. Of course, the problem with this claim is that one sees the same phenomenon, the same inability to take one’s own side, all over Europe. This is not, however, a mystery, for, as should be obvious by now, Kantian-Fichtean moral universalism is simply a secularization of Christian teachings.

Several years ago I wrote an admiring but critical review essay on Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. In it I fused Haidt with “genetic similarity theory” — and came to some interesting conclusions: Human beings evolved to prefer members of their own genetically-similar groups, and morality evolved as a mechanism to promote the cohesion of those genetically-similar groups. Further, if David Hume, Haidt’s favorite moral philosopher, is correct, then “moral sentiments” are at the basis of morality, not abstract principles such as those offered us by Kant and Fichte. And according to genetic similarity theory, the strongest sentiments we feel are for those who are biologically similar to ourselves. It therefore follows that morality simply does not “work well” when applied outside the context of a group of genetically similar humans. And an even stronger conclusion suggests itself, one that deals a death blow to Fichtean moral universalism: If the entire raison d’être of morality is group cohesion, then morality becomes toxic when it harms or negatively impacts the cohesion of the group within which it was evolved. It becomes fundamentally invalid as morality, since it defeats the very purpose for which morality arose.

An obvious example of this would be the tendency of white, American liberals to pursue an ideal of “justice” in such a way that they advocate for the disempowering of their own people as a corrective to past or present injustices (real or imagined). What appears to have happened with “liberal morality” is that moral values have become free-floating, decontextualized absolutes. Liberals pursue certain principles in such a way that they become positively destructive to the group context that gave rise to those principles and gave them meaning. This decontextualizing of values always seems to end in nihilism. My readers will already have observed that Leftists seem, in their moral crusades, to be motivated by a mania for destruction. Moral principles became tools of annihilation directed against a reality that stubbornly refuses to live up to the ideal.

4. “In the worst case, you can do no more than die”

As an example of how Fichte helped pave the way for this insanity, let us consider his extended treatment of lying in The System of Ethics. Here, Fichte discusses whether one can ever justify “white lies” — such as when one is trying to save an innocent person from an evildoer. If the evildoer asks us where to find the innocent man, is it moral to lie and say, for example, that we have no idea? Kant had treated this matter in his 1797 essay “On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives.” Notoriously, he argued that lying could not be morally justified even when the motive is to save innocent life.

To put the matter as succinctly as possible, Kant’s conclusion follows from his doctrine that the consequences of an action, or the ends at which we aim, are irrelevant to its moral worth. The morality of an action is determined solely by answering the question, “Would I will it to be the case that all other men think that x is permissible?” Since we cannot possibly desire that all men think that lying is permissible, then it isn’t — no matter the circumstances. Fichte considers the same sort of case (“A human being who is being persecuted by an enemy with a drawn sword hides himself in your presence”[29]) and arrives at the same conclusion. If anything, however, his position is more extreme than Kant’s.

Fichte introduces the topic by saying, “Defending white lies and lying in general for the sake of some good end or another is without a doubt the most absurd and at the same time the most perverted thing that has ever been heard of among human beings.” (Apparently, it is more perverted even than child molestation.) In case the reader had any doubt about his position, Fichte opens the following paragraph as follows: “Defense of white lies is also the most perverted thing possible among human beings. In defending a white lie a person discloses his own, thoroughly corrupt way of thinking.”[30]

So, what does he recommend we do in such a situation, where the threat to the innocent person is very real and the crazed attacker demands to know his whereabouts? Like a freshly-minted Yale criminal justice major, Fichte advises us to reason with the malefactor. He enjoins us to “advise him to abandon [his] intention of his own free will,” and to tell him that you will defend the persecuted party at the risk of your own life. Optimistically, Fichte suggests it is just possible that “the opponent will be so startled by your just and audacious resistance that he will desist from persecuting his enemy and will become calmer and open to negotiations.”[31]

But suppose this does not work, and it becomes clear that if we refuse to divulge the whereabouts of the innocent, the opponent is about to attack us. Even then, we may not tell a lie. Fichte’s advice in this situation is truly extraordinary:

[L]et us suppose that he does attack you. Why is this something you would absolutely seek to avoid? You were obliged in any case to protect the persecuted person at the risk of your own body, for as soon as any human life is in danger you no longer have the right to be concerned about the security of your own life. . . . So let him attack you! . . . In the worst case, you can do no more than die; but once you are dead it is no longer your responsibility to defend the life of the person who has been attacked, and at the same time you are thereby protected from the danger of lying.[32]

This last claim is certainly true: If I am dead, then I will not be tempted to lie. The zenith (or nadir) of this tendency of thought is reached several pages later, after Fichte has considered cases where some moral infraction seems necessary for self-preservation. He writes:

Our preservation is by no means the final end; only the fulfillment of the moral law is the final end. If we perish, then this was the will of the moral law; it has been fulfilled, and our final end has been achieved.[33]

Here, incredibly, Fichte personifies the moral law, as if he were speaking about God. Elsewhere in The System of Ethics, he makes similar statements. For example:

I am for myself — i.e., before my own consciousness — only an instrument, a mere tool of the moral law, and by no means the end of the same. — Driven by the moral law, I forget myself as I engage in action; I am but a tool in its hand.[34]

Though one always tries to be charitable to a philosopher — especially one as occasionally brilliant as Fichte — it is difficult not to see his moral thought as sheer fanaticism and as a form of what they call today “purity spiraling.” Fichte’s response to this charge would be the traditional response of the fanatic: “Fanaticism in the cause of virtue is no vice.” Yes, but in fact it is. If the reflections I offered earlier are correct, it is sheer perversity to conceive of “the fulfillment of the moral law” as the “final end” of human life. This has things exactly the wrong way round: It is, in fact, life that is the end of morality. By this I mean both the preservation of life (one’s own and that of others), as well as the leading of a good life.

Though I would stand by my claim (by no means original to me) that the Kantian-Fichtean school of moral thought is a secularization of Christian ethics, it must be admitted that both men have forgotten the words of Jesus: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27-28). For all Kant and Fichte’s talk of how “human dignity” is realized in the pursuit of moral action as an end in itself, we all know from bitter personal experience that no man is more inhuman than he who single-mindedly and rigidly applies the “moral law” without consideration for the consequences to individual human lives and to society. (For more details, see Plato’s Euthyphro.)

In the next two installments of this three-part essay, I will continue my exploration of the “forgotten roots of the Left” with a summary and analysis of Fichte’s social and political philosophy. In the process, however, we will have to confront the reasons why Fichte is often understood by scholars to be a man of the Right — indeed, an influence on the National Socialists.

To be continued . . .

* * *

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Notes

[1] J. G. Fichte, The System of Ethics (henceforth, SE), trans. Daniel Breazeale & Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 211. Italics in original.

[2] SE, 43.

[3] SE, 42. Italics in original.

[4] SE, 61.

[5] SE, 60.

[6] SE, 142.

[7] SE, 198-199. Italics added.

[8] SE, 145. Italics in original.

[9] SE, 148. Italics omitted.

[10] SE, 140.

[11] SE, 164.

[12] SE, 165.

[13] SE, 168.

[14] SE, 205. Italics added.

[15] SE, 205.

[16] SE, 205.

[17] SE, 125.

[18] SE, 125.

[19] SE, 125.

[20] SE, 135. Italics added.

[21] SE, 148. Italics added.

[22] SE, 184. First italics added.

[23] SE, 205.

[24] Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischof (London: Methuen, 1963), 183.

[25] SE, 268-269.

[26] SE, 289. Italics added.

[27] SE, 289.

[28] SE, 202.

[29] SE, 275.

[30] SE, 274.

[31] SE, 275. I have amended this passage slightly: In its original context, it is put as a question. However, none of the wording is changed.

[32] SE, 275-276. Italics added to emphasize the crazy parts.

[33] SE, 289. Italics added.

[34] SE, 244.