Essays on the Use and Limit of the Imagination in Science Book

Anxiety is about nothing. Nothing is necessary for existence of the self’s Ego because without a not-Ego there is no self. The postulated Ego’s feelings creates reality for the non-Ego and the non-Ego is a necessary and sufficient condition for creating consciousness within ourselves such that the Ego is not its own cause since that would lead to an infinite regress in support of its own ground.

Fitchte doesn’t only limit himself to his big theory about the foundation of knowledge he also contextualizes the Romantic Idealism of his time period with such great quips such as ‘the subjectivist is the idealist who places reality within our minds, and the objectivist is the realist who places reality outside of us’. Fitchte tries to reconcile the substances into a monad with his Science. I used the word substance similar to as Spinoza does, and Spinoza made the consciousness the cause of its own consciousness while Fitchte argues that the Ego and the not-Ego keeps us away from that infinite regress. Thomas Aquinas will make God the ground of all being, and makes the conscious its own first cause as Heidegger makes the conscious the cause of itself within Being and Time.

I felt this book flowed and cohered with just enough repetition to make it fully comprehendible. I had just read the series of essays from the book Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism and that book made this book easy for me to follow.

I do believe that I once read that Bertrand Russell related Spinoza to Avicenna’s floating man, that is what would happen if a man was born in space and had none of the senses to orient him with experiences or interactions with others. Fitchte does a similar thing when he synthesizes our sense experiences into a whole by creating a not-Ego in order to give relationships.

As for Avicenna’s floating man, I would say contrary to Avicenna his floating man would not have the sense of another and would have no sense of self, and Fichte also relies on experiences, our senses, and others in order for the consciousness to be aware of itself because if there was no not-Ego there could not be an Ego, according to Fitchte. This book also contains two additional essays by Fichte and Fichte has to reassure the reader that he thinks God can be conscious of Himself because it’s possible to understand Fitchte differently than the time period would have allowed.

This is an outstanding philosophy and psychology book. Sartre mixes Fitchte and Hegel and comes up with being and nothingness. Sartre most famous statement is “hell is others”, but little does he realize that without no one else to contribute to who we are it would more aptly be said that “hell would be no others”.

Fichte squares the circle of the mystery of when nature becomes self-aware of itself and outside of itself, and writes a book that gives an explanation with understanding of consciousness which he says does not rely on an infinite regress. For me, there is no more frightful thought than to wake up in a universe with no senses and no others or experiences to latch on to, and Fitchte does demonstrate in some ways why that would be so devastating since anxiety is about nothing and something requires nothing in order to process our place in the universe.