stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

Kant’s due
Fichte writes that “the object of idealism [self-in-itself] has this advantage over the object of
dogmatism [thing-in-itself] that it may be demonstrated, not as the ground of the explanation of
experience [the transcendental object], which would be contradictory and would turn this system
itself into a part of experience, but still in general in consciousness” (Fichte I 428). But how do
we demonstrate the self-in itself? We do not demonstrate the self-in-itself because we know it
representationally. For this reason Fichte writes: “the object of this system, therefore, actually
occurs as something real in consciousness, not as a thing-in-itself, whereby idealism would cease
to be what it is and would transform itself into dogmatism, but as a self-in-itself; not as an object
of experience, for it is not determined but will only be determined by me, and without this
determination is nothing, and does not even exist; but as something that is raised above all
experience” (Fichte I 428). In this sense, transcendental idealism does not have a theoretical
justification. Schelling agrees with Fichte on this point. Schelling writes that “even idealism has
no purely theoretical basis, and to that extent, if theoretical evidence alone be accepted, can
never have the evidential cogency of which natural science is capable, whose basis and proof
alike a theoretical through and through” (Schelling 331-32). This means that the self-in-itself will
have to be demonstrated in a kind of knowledge that is other than theoretical knowledge. “The
intellectual intuition alluded to in the Science of Knowledge refers” Fichte writes “to action, and
simply finds no mention in Kant (unless, perhaps, under the title of pure apperception). Yet is it
nonetheless possible to point out also in the Kantian system the precise point at which is should
have been mentioned. Since Kant, we have all heard, surely, of the categorical imperative? Now
what sort of consciousness is that?” (Fichte I 471). Fichte claims that “Kant forgot to ask himself
this question, since he nowhere dealt with the foundation of all philosophy…This consciousness
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