Buddhist Romanticism

Fichte followed Kant in giving primacy to the need for philosophy to
respect the principle of freedom, and he defined freedom in the same two
senses that Kant did: autonomy and spontaneity.
In fact, in the areas where he departed from Kant, Fichte gave even more
primacy to these principles of freedom than had his master. To begin with,
he dropped the division between theoretical and practical reason, saying
that in reality there was only one form of reason: practical. Following Kant’s
maxim that we know only what we do, Fichte argued that genuine
knowledge can come only by doing, and not by pure thinking. Because
practical reason has to assume freedom, the arguments of theoretical reason
for deterministic, mechanical laws at work in nature have no validity.
This means that there is no need to say that freedom is in any way
paradoxical or that the self is unknowable. Fichte argued that, in fact, the
self is directly known through an act of “intellectual intuition,” which
meant that this knowledge was not mediated through the senses and their
attendant concepts, but through a direct experience of the self’s activity.
This activity could be directly experienced as the self strived to impose its
reason on whatever parts of nature were “not-self.” Because this knowledge
is direct, the self has no essence lying behind its activity of striving; in fact,
the self is pure striving. It is what it makes itself, and its knowledge of itself
is no different from what it makes itself.
This principle takes Kant’s maxim that we know only what we make to
an audacious extreme. Given that, in many Christian theological systems—
such as that of Thomas Aquinas, whose theology became the official
doctrine of the Catholic Church during the Counter-reformation—the status
of being pure activity identical with pure self-knowledge was reserved only
for God, it’s easy to see why Fichte eventually ran afoul of the authorities.
Although Fichte saw the self as free in the spontaneous sense—that it
was able to strive to make itself anything at all—he did not believe that true
freedom was totally arbitrary, for the only way the self could know that it
was not a slave to its passions would be for it to exercise autonomy as well.
In other words, it was truly free only when it took on Kant’s categorical
imperative as the principle guiding its actions.
Because what is not-self will never fully succumb to the striving of the
self, the experience of the self is one of endless striving. This certainly was
true of Fichte’s own life, in that he lost two professorships—first in Jena,
then in Berlin—as a result of standing up for his moral principles when
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