synthetic a priori, since they are not contained merely conceptually in one
another, must be recognizable by a form of pure intuition or non-empirical
perception (Coffa, 1991: 17–19). Fichte widens the implications of pure intui-
tion into a full-fledged Idealism. He works both synthetic and analytical a
priori into a combined system. For Kant, analytical judgments are based on
the principle of contradiction, which, as Fichte notes, means that something
cannot be A and not-A at the same time (Fichte, [1794–1997] 1982: 121,
111–112). Fichte widens the analytical method: it consists in seeking aspects
in which things are opposed, which he now labels antithesis, making analysis
more dialectical than it was in Kant. Synthesis is the discovery in opposites of
the aspect in which they are alike. Thus both analysis (antithesis) and synthesis,
or analytical and synthetic a priori, imply each other. Fichte emphasizes the
radical consequences. There are no purely analytic judgments (a point echoed
five generations later by Quine in a logical positivist context which had
completely disowned Idealism). Bringing this line of argument together with
Fichte’s points just outlined, we find that all valid synthesis is based on or
contained in the synthesis of self and not-self.
Here we have the formula thesis-antithesis-synthesis later used as a scho-
lastic formula by Hegel’s followers. For Fichte, it is purely a set of mutual
implications, not a sequence which develops in time. (Obviously for a Kantian,
time is merely a category of sensory understanding.) Fichte draws out the
implications of Kant’s synthetic a priori. Where Kant argues that 7 5 12
is not analytic, that the concept 12 is not contained in the concept 7, Fichte
recognizes that the truths of arithmetic are tied together as parts of a larger
conceptual scheme. Fichte goes beyond Kant in showing how profoundly
relational the world is. It is this method, rather than any mechanical dialectic,
that Fichte makes available to other philosophers, the weapon by which so
much territory was suddenly opened for conquest.
Fichte does not reject ordinary logic; the principle of contradiction is one
of the devices by which he develops his own system.^34 Fichte solves contradic-
tions by progressively redefining terms which turn out to be contradictory. The
systematic interrelation of concepts, and their contradictory nature when seen
from a one-sided viewpoint, is a discovery along the pathway laid out by the
Kantian search for necessary presuppositions of one’s initial judgments.
The process leads to an underlying, necessarily presupposed ground. Fichte
declares that he has met Jacobi’s challenge, demonstrating that there is some-
thing beyond reason, unconditioned by anything else, at the starting point.
This identification with the ultimate in Jacobi’s fideism enables Fichte to
capture religion as having been deduced from philosophy. The move makes
Idealism not merely a limiter of the claims of religion, as it had been for Kant,
but a potential conqueror of religious turf.
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^655