FICHTE

Subjectivity - ground up
We can know for certain we have thoughts and sensations as a subject.
Knowledge begins with subject. Ego = absolute. The centre.
Descartes - We know the self exists.
But Fichte adds Kantian ideas of consciousness shaping perception.
Perseption constucts the world around us. We constitute the world.
Fichte - "I am I"
Identity - A thing is a thing.
I am I - means the world becomes the subject. But the subject constitutes them
through cognitive faculties. Objects are me.
HEGEL
I = individual self consciousness
What about universal consciousness - "consciousness as such".
We are defined by shared capacity of reason, not the particulaty of sensations.
Fichte - alienating. Everything becomes the I. There is nothing concrete beyond
it.
Spirit is individual, subjective and relative.
Hegel wants spirit to also be universal.
Reason is what makes humans unique, not their individuality.
When I am the absolute, we have relativism.
(Hegel - Lectures on the History of Philosophy p. 507)
Relativism cannot last. We need to find fixed truth. Schlegel became Catholic.
Kant - Our mind determines our perception of the world. We recieve sense data fr
om outside and we need
to create from this data "representations" which organises the data coming from
the senses. The thing-in-itself
is unknowable. We need our mind to make sense of the world. Faculties also limit
the possibility of knowing the "in-itself".
Content = Raw data.
Form = The way that data is organised, or represented.
Fichte wants to overcome this dualism by arguing that they are always connected.
The world is a product of human
cognition, so the idea of a split, of something other than the self is absurd.
For Kierkegaard, this represents a negation of the world of actuality.
Fichte negates the world - insubstantial. Negativity toward the world. We need t
o negate the world in order to gain something stronger.
Romantic ironists tend to reject everything root and branch. Uncontrolled irony.
Living poetically.
Kierkegaard advocated "controlled irony" whereby you accept conventions, but act
critically toward them. It is about critiques prevailing culture

and looking for reform. Not wholesale negation.

Irony is the way. It is not the truth. 327
Irony undermines view of christianity as objective doctrine.
Was Kierkegaard presenting himself as a scoundrel "living poetically"?
Was he aware of this?
The self as mere presentation. Inauthentic.