/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15848246]

So how does the I posit itself? What is he I? Where does it come from? What does the self-positing do? Why does it posit non-I?
I feel like he very poorly explained all of this, I got lost in Wissenschafslehre.

[Anonymous No.15848680]

bump

[Anonymous No.15848925]

1. How does the I posit itself? What is the I?

The I is nothing other than this act of positing. Just think of the self in self-consciousness. Without a consciousness of the self, the self wouldn't exist at all - hence the self is nothing other than this act of self-consciousness.

2. What does the self-positing do? Why does it posit a not-I?

Any act of determination is a limiting. Something infinite is indeterminate and not something cognizable at all. If the I determines itself - is conscious of itself or posits itself - it must be limited. This limitation is the not-I- not something actually existing beyond the I, but rather the limit itself as it appears to it.

Of course, the I is attempting to determine itself, which is a subject and not an object, which is a contradiction. So in self-consciousness the self which is made object is never adequate to the subject which it is made obejct to, which is what it was supposed to be. In attempting to resolve this the I continuously pushes out its limits, which is the never ending chain of representations and our moral striving.

[Anonymous No.15848932]

>>15848246
>What is the I?
He says it's not an object but 'activity.'

[Anonymous No.15849063]

>>15848925
Thank you, I appreciate the answer.
Can you elaborate a bit on "never ending chain of representations"? Does he use the same definiton of representation as Kant? I know that he saw noumena as problematic (as did Kant after the first Critique, I guess).

[Anonymous No.15849233]

>>15849063
Yeah, same definition as in Kant. Never ending chain of representations as in our experience through time and every moments necessary connection to eachother (causality etc).

Noumena can refer to two distinct entities or concepts. It can either be the thing which grounds our representations or it can be the thing "beyond" appearance. They seem similar but they aren't at least for Fichte. The former is the I itself. Like for Kant, Reason was something that transcended time and space, the necessary mechanical causal connectedness of appearance, because it doesn't depend on another but only on itself, eg it's free. Morality, as practical Reason, is something above phenomena because the moral law doesn't rely on contingencies or time - e.g. it's NEVER good to kill someone, because even good consequences or circumstances are illusionary or less privileged because they appear in time, whereas the moral law is exists for itself outside of all time. In the third Critique this practical reason is raised into a kind of noumena which stands as a ground of both nature and ourselves. So you can see for Fichte, this identity between nature and ourselves is nothing other than the I. This is the kind of noumena that Kant said was outside of theoretical knowledge.

The latter kind of noumena is the kind that is commonly thought of when we think of Kant. A dualism in which there is the "unknowable reality" which is behind the curtain of appearances. As I said in the last post, nature or the Not-I is nothing other than the limit itself of you, e.g, it exists in you and not outside of you, you are just cognizing the limits of your own self. As such there is nothing beyond the limit. Some thing which exists outside of the limit and causes your representations of it would be the problematic kind of noumena.

[Anonymous No.15849408]

>>15849233
Thank you very much!